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

OpenID ?

[johnjones]

could they not just conform to a standard ?

regards

John Jones

Insanely brilliant

[dedazo]

Think about this - you can now integrate a full-blown email client into your application (CMS, corporate, portals, etc) by simply writing around what will probably be a thin WS/RPC wrapper. Branding can't be far behind, and Yahoo will probably use the insertion of (hopefully) unobtrusive ads to finance it. Higher-level customers can probably do much more, including getting rid of ads. Maybe the service will even work with other domains. Now John Coder can offer a real email client in his app with minimal effort.

It remains to be seen if they can pull this off, but it's nice to see this type of innovation and broad steps coming from somewhere other than Google. I like Google, but they need the competition or they'll start to stagnate. Competition is good!

Re:Crown jewels?

[Schlemphfer]

>Come on Yahoo...is that authentication code really a crown jewel?

The code isn't the crown jewel. What's of enormous value is the database of 250 million established Yahoo ID's.

Suppose I want to open my blog up to comments. These days, I'd be nuts to allow non-account-holders to post, since I would be overwhelmed with comment spam. How many of my users will be willing to register a brand new username and password with my site's custom code? But if you've already got a Yahoo ID, that's all you'll need to go right ahead and post on my blog. See? The barriers to participating on my site have dropped almost to nothing, all because of Yahoo's pre-existing database of 250 million users.

This is a win all the way around. It's a win for Yahoo, since it makes it more valuable for people to own a Yahoo ID. It's a win for me, since I don't need to generate custom code and maintain a database for user passwords. And it's a win for my users, who can now comment on my blog with little or no hassle.

The losers? Sites like typekey.com, who were created to offer the same feature that Yahoo is about to offer, but who don't have the crown jewel of 250 million user accounts.