The OpenID project got a huge shot in the arm today as Yahoo! announced their support for the OpenID 2.0 single sign-on framework. As of today, there are a total of about 120 million OpenID accounts spread across services such as myopenid, WordPress.com, AOL (covered here before), and others. Yahoo! triples that number today by becoming an OpenID provider and adding approximately 250 new OpenID enabled accounts. Yahoo! users can expect to be able to use the services in private beta on January 30.This means users will be able to log into more than 9,000 OpenID enabled sites with their Yahoo! username and password. For those of you who are unfamiliar with OpenID, it is a single sign on system for the web. Meaning if you look to join and log-in to a new site, you can use one username and password across all these disperate websites. For more info about OpenID, see Wikipedia or the OpenID homepage.
This can be counted as a huge win for the OpenID project. We believe in the idea of OpenID, but it won't be successful until the major players in the web market hop on board. We hope to see the other big companies such as Google and MSN hop on board and start serving up some OpenID goodness.
[via TechCrunch]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-17-2008 @ 12:10PM
Todd said...
Why it seems just yesterday I was reading some pessimistic blogger on the Download Squad who wrote that widespread adoption of OpenID is years and years away...oh wait.
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1-17-2008 @ 8:33PM
alex dante said...
I was under the impression Yahoo had supported OpenID for a while, I definitely recall it being an option when playing around with Pipes in 2006.
Is the news just that they're supporting OpenID 2.0?
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