Being More Open
| Thursday, January 17th, 2008 | --jr |
Well, when it rains it pours around here. (In my case, about an hour and a half after publish time)
We'll get to the MyBlogLog API Closed Beta announcement soon and a bit more on the Blog Remixer tool the music guys just released, but today's big news is that Yahoo! is becoming an OpenID publisher, and it's easy to get started adding it to your apps.
Wait, wasn't Flickr doing that?
Yep, and so is the rest of the company.
Mind you, we're still just publishing credentials and not yet consuming them, but it does mean that anyone with a Yahoo! account now has an OpenID account, and does start the path toward some very interesting times ahead.
January 17th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
That is really cool, this will definitely make it much easier for Yahoo! users to use OpenID sites and it adds a boatload of potential automatic users to any sites that support OpenID. Awesome! But it is a sort of awkward position to be in as a site that provides credentials but doesn’t use them ourselves. Obviously, we’re still helping provide support for the OpenID movement and that’s sweet, and this is a huge feature for existing Yahoo! users who trust Yahoo! and want to use that login on other sites, but it feels like we’re not adding much for existing OpenID users.
As you mentioned, of course, this is just a first step, and I guess it’s hard to say whether, given how carefully we guard Yahoo! IDs to be secure and trusted, if we can start accepting credentials into Yahoo! systems for just anyone who can run an OpenID login server. But it will definitely be interesting times ahead to see where we go with this. :)
I’m not as familiar with OpenID; would there be the facility to take an existing OpenID that you had already used to contribute to other sites out there and merge it with a Yahoo! OpenID?
January 18th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
[Removing Official matching Yahoo! Mantle and PopPom set]
Yeah, I agree that it’d be WAY cooler if we were an OpenID consumer rather than just another publisher, but I’m trying my best to get folks moving on that end too. In truth, I don’t think we’ll ever really open things up to anyone using an OpenID like we do someone who’s got a Y!ID (So, probably no email, chat or message boards) but there’s lots of other stuff we can do.
As for merging content, yes and no. One of the aspects of OpenID is that it’s just that. That means that each instance of an OpenID is distinct. It’s kind of up to the OpenID consumer to do the work of tying your AOL OpenID to your Yahoo! OpenID. Again, possible, but does require effort both on your part and the consuming sites part.
[Redonning Official Y! Stuffage]