By the way, I realized that I never said “good on you” to Yahoo! for their Open Hack Day. Just before Open Hack Day, Yahoo! also launched BBAuth. Using BBAuth, web users can authenticate to an application using their Yahoo! user id. If that sounds neat, Google offers something similar called Google Account Authentication that you might want to check out.
Anyway, I just wanted to make sure that I told Yahoo! congrats. Any time you see this level of enthusiasm, it was clearly a very cool event, and it sounds like the attendees had a really good time.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
The web definitely needs a (company independant) single sign on
C’mon now, can’t you just say congrats to Yahoo! w/o talking about Google.
Thanks for the props Matt. It was great to see some Googlers there supporting the event. Hope you can make it next time!
Matt, any idea how many active Google Accounts there are? Yahoo! makes for a compelling integration choice because they’ve got some 200MM+ accounts. If you implement it, there’s a good chance your users will have a Y! ID already.
I imagine most Google users are still just Google Search users, and it’s not a requirement to have a Google Account in order to search … so while Google may have a lot of users, I’m guessing only a small fraction–say, 20%?–have Google Accounts. I could be wrong. Is the figure published anywhere?
Google Account Authentication sounds awesome. I too am curious to find out how many Google Accounts there are compared to Yahoo accounts. I would like to beleive that it would be higher than 20%. Look forward to hearing more responses about that.
Dossy, I know that there are many Google Accounts users, but I don’t know whether we’ve released any numbers.
You never get a second change to make a first impression
When Yahoo started, so many years ago, it immediatly gained huge support from all the Microsft(MSN-Hotmail)-haters, so hey, you had to become Yahoo.
I had 1 look at it and thought to myself: “what is the buzz all about? I’m not a 16-year old girl, this is not for me. I turned away from Yahoo and never looked back.”.
The only time when I checked in for yahoo was to drop them my RSL sitemap. I still get that feel from them. I find it very hard to take them serious.
my 2 Baht …
Thanks, Matt. I think we surprised ourselves a little on Open Hack Day.
Okay, make that “a lot.”
You should come next time.
Matt it’s nice of you to compliment Yahoo on a job very well done. Maybe you should buy some Yahoo stock to diversify?
Thanks for the invitation, Jeremy and Bradley. If my wife were out of town, I probably would have stopped by to say hello.
Joseph, if I wanted to diversify, I don’t think my portfolio would need any more internet company stock.