Yahoo! instant log-ins take new OAuth

OpenID goes hybrid

By Cade Metz in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 20th September 2009 07:31 GMT

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Yahoo! has combined OpenID instant log-ins with OAuth data swapping. In other words, after logging in to a third party web site with your Yahoo! account, you can now swap profile data, contacts, and other info between the two.

On Friday afternoon, with a post to the Yahoo! Developer Network blog, the web giant announced its embrace of the OpenID OAuth Hybrid Protocol, which combines OpenID log-ins with OAuth access control in a single interface.

Google added the hybrid protocol to its accounts in late January. And on the other side of equation, you'll find third parties like Plaxo, a social networking outfit, and JanRain's RPX, which handles log-ins for various sites across the web.

Rather than set up a Plaxo account from scratch, Yahoo! users can sign in with their existing accounts, before feeding profile data and contacts between the two sites. And Google users can do much the same.

Yahoo! has also switched to OpenID's Popup UI, which lets you log-in to a third party site without a jump back to Yahoo! And in the interest of added security, it has given users the option of a creating a "sign-in seal," a kind of personal stamp that will appear whenever Yahoo! asks for a password.

Yahoo! is one of several big-name tech outfits running OpenID trials for Barack Obama and federal CIO Vivek Kundra. The Center for Information Technology, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Health and Human Services are testing the technology before it's rolled out across other federal sites. ®

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