Life is grand

While Yahoo!’s support of OpenID is a good thing they have only written half the story. Their support is purely the provision of OpenIDs. You can now use your Yahoo! account to log into other websites that support OpenID. What you cannot do with Yahoo!’s announcement is log into Yahoo! properties with an OpenID you may already have.

With my Yahoo! OpenID I now have several OpenIDs. When I use Yahoo! sites, like Flickr, I am forced to use my Yahoo! login and not my, say, LiveJournal OpenID. I want to log into Flickr with my paulmwatson.com OpenID powered by MyOpenID.

David of 37Signals likens it to having multiple IDs in real life and he is right. I disagree it is a good thing though. Yahoo! won’t be around forever which means that at some point in the future all the sites you log into using your Yahoo! OpenID will stop working for you. You will have to get an OpenID from another site.

So with several OpenIDs by several companies you may or may not use for life you end up pretty much in the same situation we have now with individual logins per site.

Yahoo! needs to consume OpenID as well as produce. OpenID needs to let me choose different profiles from within my one OpenID. I don’t want real world identity problems to be a problem in the virtual world.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.