Plaxo and Yahoo! have long been working together to improve the interoperability of our services, making the process more seamless, powerful, and user-friendly. And we've always done it in ways that are fundamentally open, so others can learn from our experiences and get the same benefits elsewhere. Yahoo! and Plaxo were the first widely available showcase of OpenID 2.0 in action, we were the first large user of their new Address Book API, and we were the first to experiment with them adding profile portability on top of their OpenID flow. And today we're taking another giant step forward!

Starting today, we're beginning the roll out of a new experiment with Yahoo! for "hybrid OpenID+OAuth signup" to Plaxo. This approach is both more powerful, and more user-friendly than anything we've done so far together. It's more powerful because a Yahoo! user can not only sign up for Plaxo using their existing Yahoo! account (no new Plaxo-specific password or lengthy signup flow required), in the same act they can now share access to their profile, contacts, and updates stream, allowing persistent and 2-way flows of their important social data. This means they can quickly become a power-user of Plaxo, and the bridge they've built will allow future updates on either Yahoo! or Plaxo to flow in both directions--as always, in accordance with the user's wishes. And it's more user-friendly because Yahoo! has incorporated the latest "Open Stack user experience" research into their design--using a friendly, light-weight popup that clearly shows the user what they're being asked to share.

As usual, we'll start presenting this new flow to a small sample of new Yahoo! users who come to join Plaxo, and we'll report on the results as soon as they become clear. Our "hybrid signup" experiments with Google earlier this year produced the best results the industry had seen thus far, so of course we're very excited to see what we can do with Yahoo! This is further validation that open standards can give mainstream users greater control over their information and a greater ability to make the tools they use work well together. In fact, the vast majority of the code we built for use with Google was reusable without modification for Yahoo! And even though Yahoo! does not yet support Portable Contacts--the emerging standard for exchanging address book, friends list, and profile data--it was easy to transform the output of their API into this standard format, so it would "just work" with the infrastructure we already had.

Read the full story from Allen Tom at Yahoo! Developer Network Blog.

Here's what this new flow looks like to a Yahoo! user that was just invited to join Plaxo:

Selected Yahoo! users will see a custom invite landing page featuring express sign-up.

They can then sign in via a friendly popup (Plaxo never sees their password).

They can authenticate and share their profile and social data in a single click.

Plaxo can then help the user get connected without any additional friction.

Finally, they're shown how to sign in next time using their Yahoo! account.