Yahoo invests more as an Identity Provider
Today Yahoo signaled that they aren’t yet down for the count, and are trying to come back with their Open Strategy. To recap, their Open Strategy consists of 4 pieces:
With YAP and YSP, Yahoo is gets deeper in bed with OpenSocial and at its heart, is the implicit reliance on a rich user profile. It should then be no surprise that Yahoo also announced a new Yahoo Profile, which includes a new look-and-feel, the ability to create mutual friendships with other Yahoo users and a goal for universal reliance on these profiles for their services. So far, Yahoo has done a terrible job with the user’s identities creating no added value for using the same identity across all their services.
For any identity provider, the strength of the identities you issues are only as valuable as both the assertions that it makes and the services that accept it. The newly increased investment in user profiles, along with Yahoo’s previous support of OpenID, places Yahoo in a fantastic spot for increasing value for its users and all of its underlying services.
