This is pretty cool – I’ve been reading about OpenID for a while now, gotten interested, but hadn’t done anything much about it. Now I learn, via Flickr’s Blog that Yahoo has implemented Yahoo (and therefore Flickr) IDs as OpenIDs.
Frankly, I’ve been leary of Yahoo since 1999, when they bought out GeoCities and propmptly introduced a really obnoxious new Terms of Service agreement. To quote from the Geocities Wikipedia article:
“Yahoo!’s acquisition of GeoCities proved extremely unpopular and users soon began to leave en masse in protest at the new Terms of Service put out by Yahoo! for GeoCities. The terms stated that the company owned all rights and content, including media such as pictures.”
I promptly pulled down my Geocities site, along with thousands of other Geocities users, and that was my first contact with Yahoo (and with copyright/IP issues, really) — it left a really bad taste in my mouth for many years. Yahoo’s become a lot less clumsy over the years, though. They bought Flickr without ruining that community, they support various FLOSS projects now, and appear to actually be “Playing well with others”, more or less.
Check out Yahoo’s OpenID page for more details. I’m looking forward to having to create fewer extra login identities now, as OpenID gets even mroe widespread.
…and yes, I know the company’s formal name is Yahoo!, complete with exclamation mark. That disrupts sentences too much to be taken seriously, though…