OpenID is an open, decentralized and free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of existing Internet technologies like URI, HTTP, SSL, and Diffie-Hellman. Well, now Yahoo! has 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 and others. Yahoo! triples that number today by becoming an OpenID provider and adding approximately 250 new OpenID enabled accounts. According to Yahoo’s announcement, this new option will be available in public beta starting on January 30th – less than two weeks away. A user’s Yahoo OpenID identifiers will be accessible from me.yahoo.com, or he or she can type in www.yahoo.com or www.flickr.com on sites that support the framework. Alternatively, those sites will be able to easily add a button saying “Log in with your Yahoo ID.â€
This means users will be able to log into more than 9,000 OpenID enabled sites with their Yahoo! username and password. Speaking to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Raj Patel, Yahoo’s director of membership and registration said, “This is just the first step in working with OpenID.â€
You can read more about Yahoo’s plans on this front and see a demo at openid.yahoo.com.