Is Yahoo Planning Its Own Live ID?
According to a tip from one of our readers, Yahoo is planning to open up its services even wider and allow users to sign in without having to use a Yahoo ID. According to our tipster, Yahoo would allow you to log into Yahoo's services while using an email address from any other provider, similar to what Microsoft is doing with its Windows Live ID. If true, this would certainly be in line with some of the announcements that Yahoo made about it's Yahoo Open strategy.
We assume that this implementation would either look like Microsoft Live ID, or maybe somewhat akin to what logging into Zoho looks like today, where you can log in with your Zoho credentials, or your Yahoo and Google accounts.
Yahoo's Open Strategy
Yahoo, of course, would prefer to lock its users into using its services. However, Yahoo has also been a major proponent of OpenID and a lot of the recent announcements around Yahoo Open, SearchMonkey, and allowing more third-party content on Yahoo's sites make us believe that Yahoo might indeed be willing to allow users to bring credentials from other providers to Yahoo. The easier it is to log into a service, the more like you are to use it and to return to it.
Smart Move?
Do you think this would be a smart move by Yahoo? Or should they just throw their weight behind OpenID? Would you be more likely to use Yahoo services if you didn't have to sign up with Yahoo?
Update: Eran Hammer-Lahav, Open Web Evangelist at Yahoo, contacted us in response to this story and assured us that "Yahoo! is committed to open specifications and OpenID."
Comments
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Hey Frederic, I think you're missing out on some of the work that has been happening in the OpenID community around being able to use an email address style identifier as an OpenID. Brad Fitzpatrick posted a proposal (http://brad.livejournal.com/2357444.html) in February, David Feulling built on it a few days later (http://www.sappenin.com/openid/ext/oet/openid-email-transform-extension-1_0.html), and Vidoop is leading a project dubbed Email Address to URL Translation (http://eaut.org/).
None of this is widely adopted, but if Yahoo! were to do what you're proposing they could still base it on OpenID.
A Yahoo branded, called something less nerdy than OpenID, purple logo, ends with an exclamation point - yes.
...but is really just Open ID with some special attribute exchange data under the hood.
Yahoo does a great job making supper geeky thing fun, approachable by regular folks ( That's the 99.99999% of the planet that doesn't read RWW! ) and OpenID really needs that bad.
I personally believe that what Yahoo! truly needs is some sort of new "killer app". Log-in difficulties will never stop users from experiencing a new and exciting feature or application. I'd focus on that, if I were working for Yahoo! This sort of development is necessary, but is also problematic for Yahoo!. If users don't need a Yahoo! account or a Google account in order to use certain services, it probably follows that users will stick to the easiest to use, best performing service. I'm just not sure Yahoo! is capable of competing with Google, Apple, Microsoft or Facebook these days. Not that Yahoo! has any other options...
Orange has been offering this service in France for several months now.
This includes both inbound and outbound identity federation:
- INBOUND: ability to sign into the Orange.fr portal without registering (using a third party identity such as WindowsLive ID, YahooID or any OpenID)
- OUTBOUND: ability to access third party sites with an Orange ID (e.g. www.ipernity.com)
Microsoft introduced this same Yahoo feature since years on the old Passport authentication at the end of the previous century ;-)