Yahoo To Open Up Email Authentication

Aditi.Tuteja writes, "Yahoo has announced it will give away the browser-based authentication used in its email service, considered to be the company's 'crown jewels.' Yahoo made the announcement ahead of a 24-hour 'Yahoo Hack Day,' where it had invited more than 500 mostly youthful outside programmers to build new applications using Yahoo services. Considering the different needs of its huge user base (257 million people use Yahoo Mail), Yahoo has decided it can't build or buy enough innovation, so they are enlisting the worldwide developer community." The code will be released late in 2006. Yahoo notes that there are 'no security risks' since they keep absolute control of usernames and passwords.

Comments

Good for Yahoo

[lewp]

In their struggle to maintain relevance in the face of Google, Yahoo has really done a complete 180 from the days when their main service was a manually-reviewed index of websites. They've had the good sense to keep their noses out of (e.g. Flickr), and they've made some cool products/technologies available to the developer community for free.

Google gets all the press nowadays, but Yahoo's been pretty cool lately as well. Props!