YAHOO! OpenID

A friend just pointed Yahoo! OpenID out to me.

Here's the first paragraph:

OpenID makes it easy for you to deliver a simplified login experience for your users. Rather than having to create a unique user name and password for your website, users can now use an existing user name and password that they have created elsewhere. Of course, this is true only if "elsewhere" is a participating supplier of OpenIDs.

At Yahoo!, we acknowledge that simplifying the user login experience across the Internet benefits everyone. That's why we are a huge supporter of OpenID. By enabling our 248 million registered users as OpenID accounts, we hope that gives you a lot of reasons to support OpenID too.

Hmm. Just the other day a friend of mine said that she was reluctant to vote for Multiply at Blogger's Choice because it was another ID and another password. I have all my stuff noted down so I don't have to remember it, but I sort of agree with her.

Then I look at a program like this and wince.

The potential for this... imagine getting your YouTube, Multiply, Gmail, MySpace, and Facebook IDs hacked at once. That would be like online identity theft. Now, I imagine that Google and Yahoo! would have different programs and all that other corporate crap...

I hope that they are doing this right. I still don't think I'll sign up.

(For discussion -- could this be the future of 360?)

Ze Baron