In what may turn out to be an important development for interoperability between Internet services, online giant Yahoo! has announced it plans to support OpenID 2.0, a standard designed to enable single-login access to Internet services—even if they’re operated by different companies. Yahoo! plans to introduce beta support for OpenID 2.0 beginning on January 30 across sites like me.yahoo.com and Flickr, and offer OpenID support for the nearly 250 million active Yahoo users worldwide. In theory, that means these users could use their Yahoo! IDs to log in to other sites that support OpenID 2.0.

OpenID allows your users to have a simplified login experience across the Internet. With OpenID and Yahoo! you don’t need to have an identity management server.

OpenID is an open, decentralized and free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of existing Internet technologies like URI, HTTP, SSL, and Diffie-Hellman.