Yahoo to become an OpenID provider, 250M strong
January 17th, 2008 - Terrell RussellThe news today from Yahoo that it will be providing OpenIDs for all of their user accounts is a welcome sight.
Yahoo has been in attendance at the IIW for a while and been planning this for some time. Congratulations on getting the scale and legal issues worked out. And welcome!
Read more at openid.yahoo.com:
Once you enable your Yahoo! account for OpenID access, you can simply tell any OpenID enabled web site that you are a Yahoo! user. You will be sent to Yahoo! to verify your Yahoo! ID and password and then signed in to the web site. Its that easy!
They’ve got a nice easy explanation of the technology for users in addition to a ‘tour’. The developer network gets a page also. Very clean implementation, well done guys.
One interesting bit about their particular set-up, which will go live at the end of January - you only type yahoo.com into an OpenID box, not your full identifier. Yahoo will do the authentication and then bounce you back to the relying party. An interesting design choice - it will be interesting to see if that practice gains traction.
Update: This “yahoo.com only” is the directed identity feature of OpenID 2.0.
January 17th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
The bit where you only have to type “yahoo.com” in is called directed identity, and it’s a feature of OpenID 2.0 - in fact, I believe it’s one of the main reasons Yahoo! waited for OpenID 2.0 before jumping in. In addition to improving usability (often you won’t even need to type in yahoo.com, you’ll just click the “sign in with a Yahoo! OpenID” button) it also helps protect user privacy - Yahoo! can assign a brand new, opaque OpenID for a user’s relationship with an individual site, hence preventing third parties from tracking user behaviour across multiple sites without the user’s explicit permission.
January 17th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
[...] but somehow this had to be expected considering last week’s news about Flickr. Yahoo! has reportedly shown interest in OpenID for quite some time already - like attending meetings - and is making an [...]
February 5th, 2008 at 3:52 am
I’ve been unable to add my Yahoo OpenID to my claimID list of OpenID identities. No matter what I enter into the OpenID field, I get the same error message: “Could not find OpenID server for [whatever I typed].
April 6th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Echoing Mitch above: does this/when will this work with ClaimID?