Blue Ocean

Last week, Yahoo deployed OpenIDs, basically allowing 250 millions of Yahoo! accounts to be turned into OpenIDs. This was great news for federated identity, an old idea by Internet time standards, that is finally gaining some traction with the big guys (Google now supports OpenID commenting on Blogger). The only question that remains is whether consumers will join the party and will decide to turn their Yahoo! ID into an OpenID. After all, is there enough for them to care?

First things first: big kudos to Yahoo! for showing leadership on the identity front. Yahoo!'s implementation is actually quite elegant. For one thing, they fixed one of the big shortfalls of OpenID's user interface. Instead of a clumsy URL, you simply type yahoo.com and get redirected to Yahoo!'s sign-on page. The brand marketers will appreciate! I also suspect that typing a brand name as familiar as yahoo.com is much more palatable to consumers than typing a lengthy URL.

Not only is Yahoo! showing leadership, they are doing something really smart by attempting to capitalize on their very large digital identity asset, which will prove critical in the strategic battle for mobility and personalized advertising. If Yahoo! can become the trusted identity provider for 250 millions consumers, greatness and new revenue opportunities will certainly follow. The only question is whether Yahoo! is going far enough to move the needle. After all, consumers tend to be extremely demanding customers. They are creatures of convenience and only seem to care about being able to do new things with more ease and more speed. As long as OpenID only lets them do what most of them are already doing (login in across multiple sites), with relatively little gain in convenience (many users already use one single password for all their sites and mashups), adoption and usage may well remain limited.

So great start, but let us hope this is only the tip of the iceberg. Let us hope that Yahoo! is working hard on adding innovative new services to my new OpenID. Let us hope that consumers will adopt it in mass. What will these services be? Truly a question for Yahoo! product brain trust, but if the Yahoo! Fairy was to visit me tonight, I would make three wishes:

1. Mobility:
My world is becoming more and more Web centric and less and less desktop centric. New devices such as X-Box, Apple TV, BlackBerry are taking a larger chunk of my connected life. I need a consistent but simple way to access and personalize services and content across all these different network devices.

2. Security:
My identity is precious to me and any identity theft is a violent crime against me! Migrating to a portable identity provides the opportunity to make my identity stronger. Fairy, think V.I.P., of course!

3. Activity:
Yahoo! mail has 80% of my social address book, Flickr has most of my pictures, but many other sites have my comments, my blog, my videos. Aggregating and controlling my personal content across all these sites could benefit from a federated access and authorization mechanism.

Voila! Easier said than done. But the point is that for OpenID has to become an enabler for new user experiences, and go well beyond being a patch for "too many names and passwords". OpenID needs to focus on enabling what consumers will want to do tomorrow not on optimizing what they did yesterday. Short than that, consumers may not care and OpenID will be yet another missed opportunity for enabling and protecting digital identities on the Internet.