Yahoo! beats Google to the punch (for once)
A little while ago I speculated that we would see a single sign on (SSO) system from Google at some point. It would seem that, for a change, Yahoo! has beaten them to the punch. Browser Based Authentication (BBAuth) circumvents the whole 'signing up for another account' thing by linking to your Yahoo! account and requesting permission for certain information.
This is very exciting and finally brings a wide audience and massive userbase to SSO without silly usage fees for site owners (like Microsoft tried with Passport). I've got a Yahoo! account which I've had for years but hardly ever use and even my Dad's got one which is a very good sign of the level of adoption and breadth of users.
As a footnote (and a footnote it truly is by comparison), SXIP released Whobar: a unified login device written in PHP for InfoCard, OpenID and i-names identities. An interesting development but OpenID et al have a long uphill battle against the larger online communities; especially now that those larger communities are opening up to third party use.
An exciting time indeed for web developers \o/
