Yahoo! will be an OpenID Provider

So Yahoo! is joining the OpenID community officially. That’s great news 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 important step now. People can use their Yahoo! IDs as OpenIDs by January 30 when the public beta starts.

Details

It’s important to note that Yahoo! will only support OpenID 2.0 enabled websites. That means that users won’t be able to log in to some sites or blogs that haven’t upgraded from OpenID 1.1 yet. In the long run this won’t be much of a problem, I guess, because OpenID 2.0 is providing more features and therefore most OpenID enabled websites will adopt this new spec.

Usually OpenIDs look like this: username.openidprovider.com. Yahoo!’s implementation only demands a simple yahoo.com, flickr.com will work as well. Users will be redirected to Yahoo! where they are logged in with their Yahoo! ID. That’s straightforward.

There will be a so called Sign-in Seal to prevent users from phishing. Users choose some text, an image or colour which they will see each time they sign in to Yahoo! If they don’t see it they are on a phishing site. Other providers offer similar features but Yahoo!’s seems to be really well done.

Promotion

Being an OpenID provider is positive but it’s just a first step, I think. Yahoo! also has to start consuming OpenIDs. The world doesn’t need an endless amount of providers but consumers. OpenID doesn’t make sense if people can’t log in to many and – that’s probably equally important – big and well-known sites. Somehow I am optimistic that Yahoo! will start consuming OpenIDs later this year, though.

Yahoo! has to be public about its OpenID support. Every Yahoo! user has to know about it. It has to be on the frontpage of yahoo.com. Or to cut it short: Make a better job than AOL! Fortunately there are some positive indications already.

• Developers can download Yahoo! Login buttons
• There is a nice little screencast explaining OpenID

Though we will have to wait until the public launch of Yahoo!’s OpenID suppport to see how OpenID is communicated to the public.

For more thoughts on this part of the story have a look at Marshall Kirkpatrick’s article on Read/Write Web (though I shouldn’t quote him too often, I guess ).