[OpenID] Flickr users can now login with a Google account via OpenID

[Allen Tom]

Because logging in is an extremely high value operation, sites like Yahoo
are very cautious about making any changes to the login flow, since reducing
the number of successful logins will have a very negative financial impact.

In order to allow existing Flickr users to login with a Google Account,
Flickr would need to support an Account Linking flow. Account Linking can
get really messy, since the onboarding flow would need to ask first time
users if they already have a Flickr account, and if so, have them go through
the Yahoo Login flow to link the account (after having already gone through
the Google OpenID flow). While there are some tricks that can be done to
optimize the linking flow - for instance, checking to see if any existing
Flickr accounts already have verified the Google Account's
@gmail.comaddress, there are so many edge cases that we decided to
defer this feature
until after we could prove that people would actually want to login to
Flickr using a 3rd party account.

For sites that don't have large legacy userbases, accepting 3rd party logins
is a total nobrainer! Logging in with an existing account with rich profile
data and services is far more valuable than registering a brand new local
account.

Allen


On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 7:42 PM, Chris Messina <chris.messina at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
>  It's not everything that we're hoping for, but I think it's somewhat
> unreasonable to imagine that any of the large service providers will be
> ready to just flip the switch and move entirely over to federated login
> without a more graduated approach to help users ease into that new
> situation.
>
>
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