Yahoo’s march back to into the limelight has been slow and highly criticized. Yahoo has been buying startups left and right for their products and also their talent, and most notably Yahoo bought microblogging site Tumblr. Yahoo first introduced the ability to sign in with Facebook and Google accounts in 2010, in hopes that people would login more often through these services. Now Yahoo wants to return to using Yahoo ID and not allowing users to sign in with other services. The company says this will allow it to offer “the best personalized experience to everyone.”
All Yahoo properties including Flickr and Tumblr will have the third-party logins phased out in the near future. Yahoo wants to once again become a portal where all your internet needs are meet, and they are starting to look like they can compete with Google. They have their own blogs, email service, login service, and have dozens of startups to help build new things. Hopefully, everyone will remember their Yahoo ID’s and passwords. Thats saying that people still use Yahoo for anything.
I would love for Yahoo to provide information on how many users use the third party logins, because if its a lot we could see a lot of users either locked out of their accounts or very upset. I’m also wondering if Tumblr will require users to have their Yahoo IDs or if you can still keep your account separate, because if they require the Yahoo IDs there many users may just jump ship. Either way Yahoo is throwing a hail mary with no time left and it looks like it might pay off.