It feels good to be able to talk publicly about Yahoo's OpenID support (developer info). :-)

It's been in the works for a while and I was one of the early squeaky wheels poking people to see if we could get on board. You can see the official press release or the story on TechCrunch. But no matter where you read it, this is big news.

Both yahoo.com and flickr.com will act as OpenID 2.0 providers. That means starting soon any Yahoo! or Flickr user can sign in to an OpenID 2.0 enabled site simply using a reference to yahoo.com or flickr.com.

I've been a fan of OpenID for a long time--not just because of it's simplicity but because of the philosophy behind it. It puts more control in the hands of us: the end users. And it's another milestone in Yahoo! opening up more and more. In fact, I wrote about it almost exactly one year ago in The Tipping Point for OpenID.

Who knows. Maybe OAuth support isn't far off?

Oh, and before anyone jumps on me about this not being "full" (meaning bi-directional) OpenID support, I'm quite aware of that. Consuming OpenID is a different beast that can't happen overnight. Give it some time. I'm optimistic that we'll get there.