Last week breaking news about Yahoo announcement to integrate Facebook features across its network doesn’t mean it’s a log-in agreement as explained by Yahoo senior. Yahoo agreement with Facebook means Yahoo developers will be working on implementing couple of major developments inside Yahoo giant platform, for a strategic meaning, as 52% of Yahoo users visit Facebook and 84% of Facebook users visit Yahoo (comScore, US, Oct 2009). These development are explained as following:
Facebook Connect on Yahoo!
It will not be possible to sign in to Yahoo with a Facebook ID; rather, they’re using Facebook Connect to enable Yahoo users to authorize data sharing between the sites. With this agreement, logged-in Yahoo users will be able to bring the social stream that’s relevant to them on Facebook into their Yahoo account and to publish their social activities on Yahoo! (e.g. Flickr photo uploads, article comments, etc.) to Facebook.
This is all great for Yahoo users. The Yahoo! ID becomes a single key that allows users to check their mail, their news, and their Facebook newsfeed all on Yahoo!, as part of their Yahoo account.
Yahoo Open ID Strategy
This integration aligns with how Yahoo thinks about it’s Open ID strategy. Further explaining this strategy, Yahoo aim on building out an infrastructure that lets your Yahoo ID be a key not just to Yahoo! and Facebook Connect data, but also to other social networks and all kinds of relevant content and services.
The more value users get from a Yahoo ID, the more comfortable they are using it as a login and authorization mechanism across the web. In fact, this will allow web publishers to leverage one of the most trusted, widely used online IDs in the world, without having to invest in their own costly membership operation. There are over 600 million regular Yahoo users and ComScore overlap hovers around 80% for most sites on the web.