Last night I mentioned that we’d have a few more announcements on the Yahoo! Developer Network today.
I just posted the latest: Browser Based Authentication or BBAuth as we like to call it.
Our Browser Based Authentication (BBAuth) is a generic mechanism that will allow users to grant 3rd party web-based applications access the Yahoo! data. There’s already a similar mechanism in place on Flickr and used by services like MOO. BBAuth is the protocol that’s going to open the door to doing the same thing for many Yahoo! branded services in the coming months. Stay tuned for those announcements. 🙂
Beyond that, BBAuth also makes it possible to use Yahoo! as a single sign-on for your site, thus removing a barrier to entry for a whole lot of people (over 200 million to be exact). This is still fairly experimental, so we’d love to get your feedback and input on how to make it even more useful.
The first two Yahoo! services supporting BBAuth are Yahoo! Photos (API) and Yahoo! Mail (API only available to Hack Day attendees at the moment).
This was a long time in the making, so it’s quite a relief to get it out the door. Special thanks to the folks in Photos and Mail for getting support enabled in time for Hack Day.
And special thanks to Dan Theurer, who did a ton of the work on the YDN side. See Launching the Un-Launch-Able post for his take.
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Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.
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