Yahoo Users, You’ve Got OpenID
As promised, Yahoo has launched its new OpenID provider service. Yahoo’s 248 million worldwide users now have a way to login to any site that supports OpenID. To get started, just head over to the new OpenID page and set up your OpenID preferences.
To use your newfound OpenID powers, check out the ever-expanding list of OpenID consumer sites - Ma.gnolia, Technorati and Blogger are just a few of the places where you no longer need to worry about remembering your username/password combo.
At the moment, Yahoo is an OpenID provider, not a consumer, which means that those of us who already have OpenIDs still can’t use them to login to Yahoo services. But even if Yahoo’s OpenID support is disappointingly one-way, it triples the number of potential users. Yahoo’s OpenID support will likely drive not just adoption among other sites, but also other potential OpenID provider services from the likes of Google, Microsoft and more, which will now be feeling greater pressure to support the decentralized identity system.
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.
If you have no idea what OpenID is or why you might want it, 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. The Yahoo Developer site has posted an interview with OpenID champion Chris Messina.
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.
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