Facebook joins OpenID board; How will it Connect?

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. 

Details thus far are vague. Facebook's Mike Schropfer writes:

We're happy to announce today that we are formalizing our support of the OpenID Foundation by officially joining the board. It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web.

Facebook's Luke Shepard, who is a member of Facebook's platform and connect team, will be on the OpenID board, which now includes the likes of IBM, Microsoft and VeriSign. 

The OpenID-Facebook effort kicks off with a design summit next week at Facebook's Palo Alto campus. The key topics will be user experience and security. The design summit will focus on how existing OpenID efforts can support a Facebook Connect-ish experience. 

That summit may be a precursor to interoperability between Facebook Connect and OpenID. Or this effort may result in nothing all that new. Time will tell.