Yahoo becomes an OpenID provider in 2008

In January and February 2008 Yahoo, one of the largest web portals of its day, switched on OpenID for its members. It was one of the first times that a company of that size made OpenID 2.0 available to millions of ordinary accounts. This page is a historical retrospective. openideurope.eu is today an independent guide with no connection to Yahoo, to the OpenID Foundation or to the former OpenID Europe Foundation.

What Yahoo announced

Reference sources date Yahoo’s announcement of OpenID 2.0 support to 17 January 2008. It covered two roles: Yahoo as an OpenID provider, vouching for its members to other sites, and Yahoo as a relying party, accepting OpenID logins itself. The provider side went into a public beta around the turn of the month. The community’s European blog reported on 2 February 2008 that Yahoo “has now launched the public beta” of its OpenID provider service, ready for any web service compatible with OpenID 2.0. For how the protocol itself worked, see OpenID 2.0: the original decentralised login.

What it meant for users

The pitch in the post was simple. Millions of existing Yahoo members could use their Yahoo ID to sign in at third-party sites, and the company claimed it had simplified the process so that users would not need to understand the “backend concept of OpenID”. The post added that the service was already open to users in 17 countries and that international editions were in preparation.

The design relied on provider-led login from the 2.0 specification, finalised only weeks earlier (December 2007: OpenID Authentication 2.0 is approved): users should not have to type a long web address. Instead, a user could just click a Yahoo option, sign in as usual and approve the transfer of limited information.

The big numbers

On 7 February 2008 the OpenID Foundation announced that Yahoo, Google, IBM, Microsoft and VeriSign had become its first corporate board members. In that release a Yahoo executive said the company had worked for a year with the Foundation on its intellectual property framework and on the final 2.0 specification, and was adopting OpenID for all 248 million active registered Yahoo users worldwide. The same release counted more than 10,000 sites with OpenID login and an estimated 350 million OpenID-enabled URLs. The board story is told in February 2008: Google, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo join the OpenID Foundation.

Be careful with such numbers. An “OpenID-enabled URL” meant that an account could in principle be used as an OpenID, not that anyone had done so. Most Yahoo members did not know that they had an OpenID or what to do with it. The relevant measure for adoption was how many people signed in to a third-party site with it, and nobody published that.

What happened to Yahoo’s OpenID

Yahoo’s provider was one of several that arrived in 2008, followed by MySpace in the summer (MySpace announces OpenID support) and by Google and Windows Live ID in October (Google and Windows Live ID open up to OpenID). In the end, though, the major platforms promoted their own login buttons. Reference works report that Google and Yahoo discontinued active OpenID support over time, and the wider reasons are discussed in Why OpenID 2.0 faded. We could not verify an exact shutdown date for Yahoo’s service, so we do not give one.

Why this episode matters today

The Yahoo launch shows two patterns that recur in identity technology. A large platform can create adoption on paper in a day, but real use depends on whether the login is easier than the alternative. And once a technology gives control to users, platforms have little reason to promote it unless it brings them value. The same dynamics now shape the EU Digital Identity Wallet: see The EU Digital Identity Wallet explained for how law, rather than goodwill, is being used to create demand. Today the idea of “log in with a big provider” lives on in OpenID Connect. The full chronology is in the OpenID timeline.