Leaving The Day Job

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Yahoo today announced that they will be supporting the OpenID authentication protocol. This could be really big news to anyone trying to build a community based site such as a forum as users can jump straight in and get involved much more easily.

I’ll explain that logic in a minute but first : what the heck is OpenID anyway? OpenID is a open, decentralised authentication system. What that means is that you get a username and password from one website and you can use it to log in to any other website which supports OpenID. Think of it as being like Microsoft Passport was supposed to be a few years back only open, free and adopted by many more websites.

Users can choose which ID provider they want to use. When they want to log in to an OpenID-supporting website they simple provide their username (which often looks like a web addresss eg fred.myopenid.com) and the website redirects them to their ID provider to log in. The ID provider then passes back a message to the website telling them whether or not the log in was successful.

OpenID has been around for a while and it’s not really taken off outside the geek community because it’s all been a bit complicated for the average user. Why create yet another login for something you don’t really understand anyway?

What Yahoo have announced is that they will become an OpenID provider meaning that users will be able to log in to an OpenID-supporting website using their Yahoo user name and password. This more than trebles the number of OpenID accounts to about 370 million.

So back to my original point: how this can help your community website. People are swamped by user names and passwords. Getting them to create a login for your site to add to the hundreds they already have is a barrier to them using your site. Instead they’ll see a button labelled ‘Sign in with your Yahoo! ID’ and be taken straight to a familiar Yahoo login page before being bounced back to your site.

By allowing them to use their existing Yahoo credentials on your site you’re making it easier and quicker for them join your forums, comment on your blog or upload their user-generated content to your site. No form filling, no validating their email address and no illegible captchas to decipher. They’ll have a smoother path into your site and as a consequence be more likely to contribute.

There are more details at the OpenID website