Facebook to Release a Passport-like Common Logon?

With yesterday’s announcement of the statusUpdate API call in Facebook, my thoughts have been going wild on what this means. This was clearly done for Twitter and other status update sites out there. I can also see some cool uses for it in other applications too.

One thing this does hint at, whether Facebook is thinking about it or not, is the possibility of a common logon system similar to Microsoft’s Passport or OpenID. The next step Facebook should take is open their authentication system up in the API. Currently, you can get a user logged into Facebook via the API. Facebook now needs to package this and market it as a complete solution to sites like Twitter to get them to base their user profiles off of Facebook profiles. I would prefer this method personally, as I only need to update my profile in one place (Facebook), and then I can use Twitter for all my other status needs.