SOA.WRK.

Federated Social IDs: Google ID + Yahoo ID > OpenID

Zoho got a lot more new users today. The company announced a new feature to allow Login to Zoho with your Google or Yahoo! Accounts. This is a truly brilliant solution to attract new users whom may not be interested in leaving Google Docs to creat yet another account in Zoho. Now all these users can access Zoho using their Google/Yahoo ID.

The most interesting thing about this is that Zoho's solution was made possible by Google's own Account Authentication API that allows third party web applications to request user authentication in order to access services protected by a user's Google account. But in this case the protected service is Zoho office.

This is a very practical solution for the multiple ID problem that other solutions, e.g., OpenID, are trying to address. Behind the scene, the process flow is very similar between that of OpenID and Google/Yahoo's. In this case, Google and Yahoo act as the ID provider to authenticate a user. The only key missing feature is the support for Single Sign-On (SSO). Hopefully, Google, Yahoo, and others can work together to develop a solution for SSO and added it to a popular standard like OpenSocial.

IMO, identity solutions like OpenID, CardSpace, and others are too complicated for average users comparing to the old Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/AOL ID. Why can't we use them to buy tickets, print pictures, and download music on the internet?

Posted at 09:32PM May 14, 2008 by tientienli in Personal  |  Comments[2]