Oct
01
2006

Yahoo Opens up Signup System

Yahoo! announced that it’s opening up its signup system to allow external sites authenticate their users using yahoo.

You build great web applications. We have millions of users who store their data on Yahoo!. Browser-Based Authentication (BBAuth) makes it possible for your applications to use that data (with their permission).

BBAuth also offers a Single Sign-On (SSO) facility so that existing Yahoo! users can use your services without having to complete yet another registration process.

I have a couple of problems with this:

  • Yahoo only accepts Yahoo email addressses. If people signup to yahoo for the authentication or YIM they will probably not check their yahoo account very often (I know I don’t). If I have a service which needs to alert people via email, I want to be able to contact the user at any email address they want, not just their yahoo email address.
  • Until the Yahoo! Single Sign-On is widespread, it may be confusing to the users to get shuttled back to yahoo to authenticate / sign in.
  • Using Yahoo! to remove “yet another signup form” works if you require only the information that Yahoo! requires, if you have to bounce the user back to another signup form to get some more information, it would be even more confusing. Of course, it would be cool if Yahoo! allowed you to require more information and then stored that as well.

Now the disclaimer, I have read no more than the introduction article, so if this is FUD then I apologise. There is PHP example code available, hopefully I can make time to check it out.

Thanks Kventon.

Written by Aaron Wormus in: Internet, PHP, Yahoo! |

105 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment

Powered by WordPress | Aeros Theme | TheBuckmaker.com WordPress Themes