The OpenID Foundation today announced the launch of OpenID Connect, the organization's latest standard for authenticating users and building distributed identity systems.

What They Do To start, you need to understand OpenID and Facebook Connect essentially serve the same purpose in respect to identification, with different feature access separating the two.

Facebook has joined the OpenID Foundation's board to join companies like Google, IBM and Yahoo. The big question is how OpenID and Facebook Connect, a rival identity format, will be tied together.