
Yahoo Turns To The Enemy To Simplify User Registration - shawndumas
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/18/yahoo-turns-to-the-enemy-to-simplify-user-registration/
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patio11
Sounds like we're hearing the last steps of a political struggle which might
have gone something like this:

PM for Delikr: Our conversion rate sucks. Why is that? Oh, mandatory signup
for an email account with all Yahoo products causing capcha and other badness.
Well, no problem, we'll just get them to allow us Yahoo accounts without mail.

VP for Mail: Hah, no.

PM: But this is killing our unit.

VP: Not my problem. We're the stickiest unit in Yahoo. We are the first
service used by 90% of the people with Yahoo set as their home page. You guys,
meh, who cares.

CEO: Ordinarily this would be where someone might exercise leadership in the
service of our strategic priorities... but we're Yahoo, so, yeah.

PM: Could we at least use other OpenID providers?

VP/CEO: Whatever.

~~~
aristus
You forgot the 3-year gap between "Why is that?" and finding out why, and the
4-year gap between the PM asking for and receiving the "Whatever". :(

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simias
Why not OpenID? Google is an openID provider if I remember correctly (probably
not facebook though).

~~~
ComputerGuru
Because as much as hackers like to toot the OpenID horn, no normal person has
a clue wtf that is.

~~~
simias
Well, sure, and if big websites like yahoo keep not using it, it will stay
that way.

Most people already have an openID without knowing it, if yahoo wants to let
people log in with external credentials, why "turn to the enemy" when you
could use an open and unique solution that will probably cover more ground?

People don't need to know what openID is to use it, just tell them they can
use their google/yahoo/wordpress/whatever credentials.

EDIT: I would also remind everybody who _doesn't_ even have a facebook account
that the login/like/etc... widgets embedded in so many webpages these days can
be used to track you across the internet. I would really appreciate if
facebook didn't become more ubiquitous than it already is.

~~~
alabut
_"if big websites like yahoo keep not using it, it will stay that way"_

Not true - openid never took off because it has severe usability issues, not
because major sites didn't try to implement it. It's not just an open
source/standardized version of Facebook Connect, even though that's how hacker
types perceive it.

Here's the Yahoo research report on it:

[http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2008/10/open_id_r...](http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2008/10/open_id_research/)

~~~
Groxx
"severe usability issues" my ass. Nearly all current implementations,
absolutely, they are _horrible_. But would people be saying the same thing if
Facebook let you use your profile URL to log in elsewhere? From that point on,
the user-visible mechanism to log you in is _exactly_ the same as the "log in
with Facebook" buttons that people are now used to using, clearly without
"severe usability issues".

The implementations haven't been made for the average user. The _user-facing
implementations_ have severe usability issues, not the spec.

~~~
jdp23
if the spec has only led to implementations with severe usability issues, what
does that imply?

~~~
Groxx
Absolutely nothing.

We interpret sound via air waves colliding with our eardrums causing tiny
hairs to vibrate in our inner ears causing electrical signals in our head.
What does this imply about what a piano looks like? Or a stereo system? Or a
flashbang?

It even only _extremely slightly_ implies how sound-creating things function,
given that they could inject themselves at any point in that process. They
could vibrate air. They could vibrate our jawbones. They could cause
electrical impulses directly. And this discounts future creations - maybe we
discover a way to induce momentum, vibrating our eardrums without doing so by
vibrating the air. And it _entirely_ ignores synaesthesia, whereby we could
create sound by looking at a light or smelling a cookie.

Or lets take the programmer approach: the spec is an interface. What does that
imply about what goes on behind the interface?

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djhworld
One of the reasons why I have never signed up to del.icio.us is the need for a
Yahoo! account.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Not if you've been using it from before they were bought out like a lot of us
here :)

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scrrr
Does adding "Login with Facebook" really increase signups that much? Anyone
here with experience with that?

I'd imagine people are not so keen to share their FB-identity, even with sites
like Flickr.

~~~
alextgordon
I have a Yahoo account. In fact I have several. I couldn't tell you their
usernames though, let alone log in to them, since I was forced to add a long
unmemorable number to the end.

On the other hand my Facebook username is just my email address. Never going
to forget that.

~~~
Isofarro
"On the other hand my Facebook username is just my email address. Never going
to forget that."

For the audience Yahoo serves it isn't as plain and simple as that. They
probably don't own their own domains and run a mail account through that
domain - so it's more likely that they'll have an email addresss 'given' to
them by their ISP when they signed up for internet access.

So although their email address will be easily remembered during the point
they signed up, things get very confusing when these visitors move to a
different ISP for a variety of different reasons, and thus lose their previous
email address with their previous ISP, and gain a new email address with their
new ISP.

You, here, are more of an exception to the rule of the typical Yahoo audience.

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lotusleaf1987
Seems like Yahoo is giving up on competing with Facebook the same way MySpace
did, and we all know how well that worked out.

~~~
zachallaun
MySpace isn't dying because they gave up on competing; they're dying because
they didn't compete fast enough.

MySpace was like the Titanic. Big, and thought to be unsinkable. They saw a
Zuckerberg in the distance, but refused to change direction. They hit it head
on, and began leaking users too fast to recover - they were sinking. How did
they react? They built the Titanic 2.

But the brand's destroyed, and everyone is left with a bad taste in their
mouth. No one's running to hop on the Titanic 2.

