Yahoo moves to OpenID 2.0

Yahoo's login and password can now be used not only on the numerous services of this portal, but also on any other Internet sites that support the pass-through authentication standard OpenID 2.0 . For these purposes, a special authorization server has been created. Each registered user will receive a unique identifier of the form me.yahoo.com , which is suitable for authorization on any site with support for OpenID.

Currently, the OpenID standard is supported by almost 10,000 sites, and this number is constantly growing. Yahoo's decision to switch to an open standard increases the number of OpenID accounts on the Internet at once by a factor of three from 120 million to 368 million.

Distribution of Yahoo OpenID accounts will begin January 30, 2008.

The alliance of Yahoo and OpenID can be a kind of barrier to the alternative that Google is trying to create on the social networking market using open formats Google OpenSocial. Of course, there can be only one winner, whose authentication platform will capture the lion’s share of the market.
')
By the way, Yahoo experts were directly involved in the development of the OpenID 2.0 format, so the company has long been interested in the development of this standard. The first version of OpenID was developed once by Brad Fitzpatrick, one of the creators of LiveJournal.

via IDG News Service