Yet Another Extended Acronym (YAEA). With Yahoo! announcing a Single Sign On system we have a new acronym. Yet Another Single Sign On System or YASSOS.

So what happens when every major player plus a host of others each have their own SSO? Yup, we have another incompatible mess just like Instant Messaging. And we're back to sign on systems that only work within the owner's silos. Does anyone seriously think MS CardSpace, Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay are going to interoperate?

As usual, this is a tax on independent software developers. Groups like Drupal and Wordpress will need to spin off development projects to support each YASSOS. Or just ignore all of them. Which will then work against any of the major players getting enough traction to become any kind of standard.

Out of all these, I think Yahoo! actually has the best chance of getting some traction in the low end of hosted PHP apps. Purely because they've chosen to use a very simple REST+XML interface. And one that doesn't require fancy browser add-ins.


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[ 01-Oct-06 9:43am ] [ ]