Yahoo! now supports OpenID - Mainstream boost for universal log-in
By Dave Parrack
The OpenID project, an initiative designed to make one universal log-in a standard across the whole of the Internet, has been making some headway in it’s cause over recent months, but Yahoo! signing up is clearly the biggest victory to date.
OpenID was created by Brad Fitzpatrick, a web 2.0 entrepreneur, and the man behind LiveJournal. It wasn’t big news until Google implemented it as part of their OpenSocial initiative last year. From there it has spread, with many small or niche sites signing up for the scheme.
Basically, once a site has adopted the OpenID initiative, you can use your log-in on that site to sign in to any other site which is also part of the project. And vice-versa, it allows you to use your log-in from another site on that first site. That is actually English, even though it doesn’t sound like it.
Up to now, we’ve seen some admittedly big players sign up to OpenID, including AOL, the Google owned Blogger, and Plaxo, but Yahoo! is by far the biggest.
Before today’s announcement that Yahoo! will be integrating the initiative, it was thought that about 120 million users had valid OpenID accounts, but from January 30th, when Yahoo! starts it’s public beta, that will triple overnight to 360 million users.
Whether any or all of Yahoo!’s 250 million odd users will understand, and use the universal sign in is open to speculation. OpenID is still a web 2.0 focussed scheme, and I’m not sure if the mainly young and mainstream Yahoo! crowd will be interested or understand the logic behind it.
The other thing worth noting is that you still need a Yahoo! account in the first place. The OpenID scheme will only fully take off once it is one login for every single site, which isn’t directly affiliated to any of the sites involved.
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