(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-01-18 11:07

If you have a Yahoo user name and password, you can access almost 10,000 websites that suport the OpenID 2.0 digital identity framework by a single sign-on, media reported Friday.

Yahoo! co-founders Jerry Yang (C) and David Filo (R) pose with chief executive Terry Semel in front of the NASDAQ MarketSite in Times Square in New York. [Agencies]

The service starting January 30 will reduce the amount of different log-in information people need to create, remember and enter online.

Yahoo's move will triple the number of OpenID accounts to 368 million by adding its 248 million active registered users to the rolls.

Unsurprisingly, in Thursday's statement, Scott Kveton, the OpenID Foundation's chairman, hailed Yahoo's support as a crucial validation of the framework that will help spur its adoption by other large website operators.

OpenID addresses one of several issues related to giving people more control of their online activities.

Other groups are focusing on data portability, to let people move around the data and content they create online, so that they don't have to enter it manually in, say, every social-networking site they sign up for.

Other major players that have expressed interest and gotten involved in varying degrees with OpenID include Google, Six Apart, AOL, Sun, Novell and Microsoft.