Yahoo! OpenID Provider service now available as a public beta

Today, Yahoo! is launching the public beta of the much-anticipated Yahoo! OpenID Provider service. This means that users with a Yahoo! account - all 248 million of them - will be able to sign in to any website that supports OpenID 2.0, the latest version of the OpenID specification.

Key features of this release:

• Usability - Users will not have to understand the technical details of OpenID simply to use the technology. Users will not have to type their OpenID URL while signing in to websites. They can simply type yahoo.com in the OpenID textbox or, if the Relying Party website provides it, click a button that takes them to Yahoo!. For those of you who want to set up a custom URL, Yahoo! will provide a way to do so, including the ability to use your Flickr photos page as your OpenID URL.
• User education - It's necessary make users aware of the proper use of OpenID. Yahoo! spend great deal of time thinking about that and you will see some of these thoughts implemented throughout our service - whether it's an explanation of the benefits of OpenID, our OpenID tour, or messaging on the safe use of OpenID at various locations.
• Anti-phishing measures - Yahoo! suggests to the users of the Yahoo! OpenID service to set up and look for their Sign-in Seal to confirm that they are entering their password on a genuine Yahoo! page. A Sign-in Seal is a user-created image or a message that will only appear on genuine Yahoo! pages. To help prevent the bad guys on the Internet from stealing your Yahoo! account data, always look for your sign-in seal before typing your Yahoo! ID and password.

Yahoo! is also actively working on non-US English versions of the service. It is already available for 17 countries and it is expected to roll out even more international support in the very near future.

You can start using the Yahoo! OpenID service at Plaxo, Jyte, Pibb, or any other OpenID 2.0-compliant website (this list is growing everyday). Alternatively, visit http://openid.yahoo.com to set up your account for OpenID access.