According to a tip from one of our readers, Yahoo is planning to open up its services even wider and allow users to sign in without having to use a Yahoo ID. According to our tipster, Yahoo would allow you to log into Yahoo’s services while using an email address from any other provider, similar to what Microsoft is doing with its Windows Live ID. If true, this would certainly be in line with some of the announcements that Yahoo made about it’s Yahoo Open strategy.
We assume that this implementation would either look like Microsoft Live ID, or maybe somewhat akin to what logging into Zoho looks like today, where you can log in with your Zoho credentials, or your Yahoo and Google accounts.
Yahoo’s Open Strategy
Yahoo, of course, would prefer to lock its users into using its services. However, Yahoo has also been a major proponent of OpenID and a lot of the recent announcements around Yahoo Open, SearchMonkey, and allowing more third-party content on Yahoo’s sites make us believe that Yahoo might indeed be willing to allow users to bring credentials from other providers to Yahoo. The easier it is to log into a service, the more like you are to use it and to return to it.
Smart Move?
Do you think this would be a smart move by Yahoo? Or should they just throw their weight behind OpenID? Would you be more likely to use Yahoo services if you didn’t have to sign up with Yahoo?
Update:
Eran Hammer-Lahav, Open Web Evangelist at Yahoo, contacted us in response to this story and assured us that “Yahoo! is committed to open specifications and OpenID.”
