Yahoo has joined Google’s silo building by releasing BBAuth, a mechanism for other sites to access services and data within the world of Yahoo.
Unlike Google’s Account Authentication, Yahoo is allowing their service to be used for SSO and registration.
BBAuth is clearly targeted at Web 2.0 site developers, encouraging them to build apps on the Yahoo platform so that they get access to all those Yahoo users.. While I understand how this helps Yahoo strengthen their relationship with their users, it would seem Yahoo did not learn what Microsoft learned with Passport, as Yahoo is deepening their identity silo, rather then participating in the emerging identity infrastructure.
I don’t see the connection from Passport to BBAuth. Passport tried to be the single sign on mechanism for the web. BBAuth allows access to yahoo data (photos and mail currently) for a specific user. BBAuth does seem virtually identical to ebay’s auth n auth
http://developer.ebay.com/DevZone/XML/docs/WebHelp/AuthAndAuth-About_Authentication.html
(off-topic: the captcha in the comments either allows 0s of Os… which are extremely difficult for humans to distinguish. There may be others — are 1 and l allowed? Recommend not allowing those characters in the captcha.)
BBAuth allows sites to use Yahoo as an authentication service, not just to get a token to call Yahoo services, but as SSO vis-a-vis what Passport provided.
Actually, they aren’t really supporting SSO. Sure, you can do it, but all you get is a unique Yahoo generated token for the user so it’s not really useful (yet). No verified email address, no Yahoo ID, no profile URL, no …
– ask
I thought you could call an API can get some profile data? … hmmm, will need to look a little deeper.