Yahoo To Become an OpenID Provider, Giving 248 Million Users Web-Wide Identities
In what can only be described as a huge victory for the OpenID foundation, Yahoo has announced it will become an OpenID provider at the end of January.
Once the new Yahoo ID service is live, Yahoo’s 248 million users worldwide will have a way to login to any site that supports OpenID using their Yahoo account.
To give some perspective on the scale of Yahoo’s announcement, consider that right now there are roughly 120 million OpenID accounts. When Yahoo launches its beta program on January 30 that number will more than triple to 368 million OpenID users.
It would overly optimistic to suggest that you’ll never need to create another username and password for a new site, but the day is fast approaching.
Until now, despite support from larger sites like AOL and Plaxo, OpenID has remained largely a tool of the geek-elite, but Yahoo’s announcement is set to change that since it provides even those Yahoo users who’ve never heard of OpenID a simple way to use it. And that in turn gives startup sites an even greater incentive to support OpenID logins.
As we speculated last week when the me.yahoo.com URL was discovered, this is indeed the OpenID endpoint that will be launching January 30. However, there is one downside. While the press release isn’t entirely clear, it would seem that those with an existing OpenID account won’t be able to use that account for signing in to Yahoo services like Flickr.
Update: Yahoo confirms it will only serve as an OpenID provider at this time. However, as a Yahoo spokesperson points out, January 30 marks the start of an initial public beta. During the beta period, the company plans to gather user feedback and determine how it’s going to further support OpenID in the future.
Still, even if Yahoo’s OpenID support is disappointingly one-way, in tripling the number of potential users, Yahoo’s OpenID support will likely drive not just adoption among other sites, but also other potential OpenID providers like Google, Microsoft and more, which will now be feeling greater pressure to provide users with an OpenID.
And we have no doubt that the geek elite will be pressuring sites like Flickr to accept, in addition to providing, a way to login with OpenID.
For the technically inclined it should be noted that Yahoo ID, as new service is known, will support the more recent OpenID 2.0 specification and does not offer backward-compatibility with earlier implementations. The Yahoo developer pages have more details on how site owners can support Yahoo ID.
Update: For those wanting an overview of OpenID, have a look at this video which gives a good bird’s eye view of data portability in general, what OpenID is for and why you would want it. Simon Willison also has a very nice write up on how to set up your own OpenID URL, sans Yahoo, if you’re looking to get some hands on experience. And finally for some more thoughts on what Yahoo might be planning to do with OpenID, check out the second half of our earlier coverage: Is Yahoo Gearing Up to Embrace OpenID?
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