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Yahoo! OpenID Provider service now available as a public beta

January 30, 2008

Today, we are launching the public beta of the much-anticipated Yahoo! OpenID Provider service. This means that users with a Yahoo! account - all 248 million of them - will be able to sign in to any website that supports OpenID 2.0, the latest version of the OpenID specification.

In case you are curious, here are the key features of this release:

Usability - Users will not have to understand the technical details of OpenID simply to use the technology. Thanks to features introduced in the OpenID 2.0 specification, users will not have to type their OpenID URL while signing in to websites. They can simply type yahoo.com in the OpenID textbox or, if the Relying Party website provides it, click a button that takes them to Yahoo!. By not requiring users to understand the meaning of an OpenID URL, we hope that more users will be able to overcome the initial hurdles of using this new echnology. For those of you who want to set up a custom URL, we will provide a way to do so, including the ability to use your Flickr photos page as your OpenID URL.
User education - We have spent a great deal of time thinking about educating users on the proper use of OpenID and you will see some of these thoughts implemented throughout our service - whether it's an explanation of the benefits of OpenID, our OpenID tour, or messaging on the safe use of OpenID at various locations.
Anti-phishing measures - We suggest that users of the Yahoo! OpenID service set up and look for their Sign-in Seal to confirm that they are entering their password on a genuine Yahoo! page. A Sign-in Seal is a user-created image or a message that will only appear on genuine Yahoo! pages. We hope to continue working with the OpenID community to combat phishing and provide more secure experiences to users.

We are also actively working on non-US English versions of the service. It is already available for 17 countries and we expect to roll out even more international support in the very near future.

If you'd like to use the Yahoo! OpenID service, feel free to start at Plaxo, Jyte, Pibb, or any other OpenID 2.0-compliant website (this list is growing everyday). Alternatively, visit http://openid.yahoo.com to set up your account for OpenID access. We would love to hear your feedback!

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank the OpenID community for educating us over the past 1 year and helping us make this happen. In particular, we'd like to say "Thank you" to Bill Washburn, Brian Ellin, David Recordon, Dick Hardt, Johannes Ernst, Johnny Bufu, Joseph Smarr, Josh Hoyt, Kaliya Hamlin, Kevin Turner, Larry Drebes, Mike Graves, Scott Kveton, and Simon Willison.

Finally, we would not be here without the efforts of the Yahoo! Membership Platform team. Our special thanks go out to: Aanchal Gupta, Aaron Faupell, Anand Sankaralingam, Arockiasamy Mohanraj, Balaji Narayanan, Dhruv Manek, John Jawed, Michael Partridge, Naveen Agarwal, Nik Bonaddio, Rob Metzgar, Sabari Devadoss, Shrirang Ramachandra Kulkarni, Vish Shetty, Vivian Fernandez, Yu Wang. Thanks also to the all the other Yahoos that supported us in this effort.

We are obviously very excited about what this day means for our users, the OpenID technology, and the web in general. We are just getting
started and we hope to release more OpenID-enabled features in the future.

Shreyas Doshi and Allen Tom
Yahoo! Membership Platform team

Also: Jeremy Zawodny and Allen Tom sat down yesterday to briefly discuss OpenID at Yahoo. Here's the video...

Posted at January 30, 2008 9:30 AM

Comments

will be using this for sure

thanks yahoo

Posted by: iyobo at January 30, 2008 11:19 AM

great job - this is the kind of momentum openid needs!

Posted by: niyogi at January 30, 2008 3:03 PM

I am certainly going to try this..........very interesting

Posted by: Vectorpedia(Rick) at January 30, 2008 3:40 PM

Time to enable OpenID commenting :)

Posted by: kellan at January 30, 2008 4:17 PM

Kellan: yeah, it almost seems obvious, doesn't it?

Posted by: Jeremy Zawodny at January 30, 2008 4:23 PM

To use one key to unlock many doors, a strong authentication mechanism is highly desirable. I'm not talking about RSA tokens or smart cards which are either expensive
or hard to use or require driver, client s/w, etc.

Yahoo Open ID should include some strong auth designed for the mass consumers such as
Passmark (acquired by RSA) or Yubikey (http://www.yubico.com/products/yubikey) that
consumers can use without learning curves or support. I know password mgmt sites like
http://MashedLife.com is already supporting that. Way to go!

Posted by: Snow White at January 30, 2008 4:42 PM

Thanks Yahoo. Gr8 work.

Posted by: Thejesh GN at January 31, 2008 2:57 AM

I already have an OpenID identity. How can I make it work with my Yahoo! account?

Posted by: Skysinger at February 2, 2008 9:43 AM

It seems troublesome that Yahoo! won't accept OpenID unless it's through Yahoo! itself. I don't want to connect to other accounts through Yahoo! I want to connect to Yahoo! using OpenID, though.

Also, you know, if you send someone back to give more information, they aren't submitting "too many comments" "in a short period of time". They are trying to submit the first comment still. Pfft. (note -- "a short while" apparently doesn't mean 30 seconds, nor 60 seconds, let's see if it means 300. Nope.)

It's now TWENTY MINUTES LATER... nice.

Posted by: Suzanne at February 3, 2008 5:32 PM

Can we add products to yahoo shopping through an external .net application using this API? Someone please reply.....

Posted by: ram at February 4, 2008 12:47 AM

When choosing a yahoo OpenID, can you please allow me to use my flickr addy without the "www." in it? I hate that and refuse to encourage or support an outdated idea for a new idea that would seal something in place "forever". It's a good recommendation not to use the option that reveals my yahoo e-mail address (i hate spammers). I can't seem to find a new name for the 3rd option, that fits right for me. I really want to use my flickr address. So, this is useless to me already 'cause I won't sign up without a decent URL option. Otherwise, I like this try at OpenID...I'm sure a lot of people will use it...but I won't, unless it's fixed a little.

Posted by: Devon at February 4, 2008 3:35 PM

Yahoo! OpenID Provider service now available as a public beta (Yahoo! Developer Network blog)

Yahoo! OpenID Provider service now available as a public beta

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