Flickr to Authenticate OpenID - Is This The Yahoo! CES Announcement?
Rumors abound that Yahoo! will make a major announcement about OpenID today at CES. It looks like at the very least you'll be able to use your Flickr user page URL to log in anywhere that supports OpenID login. The code is live, view source of any user page and search for OpenID and you'll find it.
The service, however, is not usable yet. Try logging in to an OpenID enabled site using your Flickr URL and you'll get this message: "Hey there! You have stopped by a bit sooner than we had expected. This feature is still being tested, so please check back in a few days. " So Flickr is set to become one more of a long list of accounts you can use to login to a relative handful of websites.
Yahoo! probably has more adherents than G*d, so meaningful OpenID support company wide would blow the doors wide open. That's not likely to be what happens.
There's no code along these lines in other Yahoo! services like Del.icio.us, Upcoming or Mash. The code in question reads: link rel="openid2.provider" href="https/open.login.yahooapis.com/openid/op/auth" That is cause for optimism in as much as it's a company-wide URL.
Update: See also https://me.yahoo.com/ - all the more reason to be optimistic. I never give people enough credit when writing posts like this!
Is this all there is?
When big vendors offer to authenticate your identity to the mostly tiny sites around the web that accept outside OpenID credentials, it's hard to get excited about that anymore. I've got an OpenID account and would like to use it to login to Yahoo! services.
To be fair, I said it was a let down when Google recently enabled OpenID login to the commenting on their beta version of Blogger and it was only a week or two until all of Blogger allowed OpenID from any other provider. That's still a small start but it is something and it's a major vendor acting as a relying party instead of just an authenticating party. That's where the big turn in the road is.
I sure hope Yahoo! is going to announce more than slow experimentation with being an authenticating party at CES. Remember AOL's big OpenID announcement? It's good for nothing but PR - they haven't done anything with it, haven't educated their users about it, nothing. It's good PR for OpenID advocates too, but otherwise it's a let down.
These major vendors also don't seem to do much beyond simple authentication. Check out our coverage of SpreadOpenID for a discussion about what kinds of awesomeness are possible. Let's see some awesomeness around OpenID at CES, can we Yahoo!?
Maybe I'm being an unappreciative jerk though. Maybe this is plenty of cause for OpenID supporters to celebrate.
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Man that would be so awesome - an instant 28 million Open ID users, in one day. PLEASE do this Yahoo!
A Flickr ID? Is that the same as the Yahoo! ID I had to swap over to awhile back on Flickr?
Good for OpenID I guess but I wish I could login to Flickr with my own OpenID rather.
Why can't I comment on your blog using an OpenID?
Allen, great question. I'll forward it to the appropriate department. :)
Good first move by Yahoo! (if it becomes true). Yahoo! could switch all Yahoo! IDs to OpenIDs rather quickly, I guess. I mean there is SSO running there already, BBAuth.
Allowing you to use your flickr (i.e. yahoo) id and login as your openID is a good step, but...
I agree with you.
I want to login to yahoo, google, et-al using my openID(s). I'm far less interested in using my yahoo account as my identity.
Still, if this helps to spread adoption of openID then it's a win.
I wrote a gateway to demo what sharing flickr pictures would be like with OpenID+SocialNetworking a couple months ago:
http://openidr.mekov.com/
Hopefully they'll begin to do really interesting things with OpenID, more than just consuming/providing. (i.e. encouraging tagging of people with OpenID rather than the conventional "firstname lastname" in individual pictures)
I couldn't agree more. I'm sick of having OpenID and being unable to REALLY use it. I'm dying to log into flickr and other Yahoo services with my OpenID soon.
One small step for Yahoo, one giant leap for the web. Let's hope they replace Flickr Auth with Oauth and then we are really seeing change.
Amazon Web Services would be a big win for the openid + oauth community but that will only happen if Openid+hcard gets converted into a microid and then used to replace the Access Key.
But if Yahoo only just announce openid support then that is not a big "enough" thing to save their decline.
Looking forward for your post. Congrats, Its good to know someone from Tampa. I am from Sarasota, Florida
Suresh
In my opinion, Yahoo! can change the game in 2008 and take back the search leadership if they will open to know the next search model paradigm.
Thank you, everyone. I'm excited to be here and honored to have been asked. :)
Markus deserves all the luck in the world, he offers a quality product which is totaly free of charge to the end user.
It's a site that provides a social service to anyone in the world that wishes to use it and it is loved by millions.
Eat your hearts out all of you who have an illness called jealousy...good luck to this man, I hope he gets filthy rich.
I for one am really greatful for the free use of this wonderful site.
Thank goodness for the two commenters as I (a non-geek) was getting excited about the "good news"
Thank you all!
- Kare, movingfrommetowe.com