Yahoo Stands by OpenID, Despite the Recent Facebook Deal

Yahoo recently announced a thorough partnership with Facebook that would take the integration between the two services to the next level. Facebook features will show up in most Yahoo products and users will be able to update their status on both sites in one go. Now, Yahoo is clarifying some details about what exactly the deal entails and what it means to the OpenID implementation.

“First off, I want to take the opportunity to clarify some misperceptions that we’ve noticed: the Facebook deal is not a “login” agreement. It will not be possible to sign in to Yahoo! with a Facebook ID. Rather, we’re using Facebook Connect to enable Yahoo! users to authorize data sharing between the sites,” Daniel Raffel, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo Open Strategy, wrote on Yahoo's Developers blog.

What it basically means is that users will be able to access their data and friends from Facebook in Yahoo sites opening the door to a lot of possibilities but also share anything from Yahoo or one of its many proprieties, Flickr for example, with their friends on Facebook. The way Yahoo spins it, rather accurately, this is actually a great win for Yahoo ID saying that the partnership enables users to access a great deal of content and sites using just their Yahoo credentials.

However, the partnership doesn't affect Yahoo's relationship with OpenID, the company is claiming, and it will continue to work on and improve its implementation of the login standard which, similar to Google's, aims to make it easier for users to handle as OpenID has been notoriously hard to understand even for the more tech-savvy users. “We are committed to OpenID and the OpenID Foundation. We believe that making a Yahoo! ID useful across the whole web benefits everyone. Web publishers can leverage one of the most trusted, widely used online IDs in the world, without having to invest in their own costly membership operation,” he added.