San Francisco — Data portability is the name of the game that everybody wishes to become part of it these days. From OpenID to Facebook Connect to Google Friend Connect, there are more and more ways to use a single login and make your information available anywhere on the web. And today, the latest to join the race is: Yahoo Updates, which became the latest to compete with more than 600,000 websites today with the launch of a new partnership with commenting infrastructure company JS-Kit.
Yahoo Updates is lifting the curtain in a big way by partnering with JS-Kit, a service identified as a “distributed social network connecting more than 600,000 sites,” which powers comments and ratings on sites like AOL and Sun Microsystems. Sites on these network employing the JS-Kit comment widget are already hooked in to Yahoo Updates, enabling users to publish stories and comments from around the web onto their Yahoo Updates feed.
Unlike Facebook’s technology for connecting profiles and activity updates between sites over the web that has kindled concerns about ownership control over data, Yahoo has applied the open standard OAuth in its system. Thus users will be able to take their Yahoo ID with them around the web. With glittery new APIs, this is all part of Yahoo’s Open Strategy.
Moreover, its association with JS-Kit opens up opportunities for their publisher network to leverage on the audience reach of Yahoo! Updates as well as the corresponding traffic their content would get from other Yahoo online properties.
The vision for all these kinds of systems is that allowing readers to authenticate themselves with a trusted 3rd party makes them more likely to post comments, offers exposure to site owners when comments are syndicated into activity streams on bigger sites and should allow site owners to access verified information about their readers’ profiles and interests. That last part is still something we are waiting for, but that should be part of the value proposition to site owners.
Another option by which JS-Kit publishers can utilize this association is through the Comments widget which would allow them to publish stories on their Yahoo! Updates feed. These updates feed will be shown on Yahoo’s content sites as well as shared with Yahoo users through Yahoo’s friend connection.
Publishers can also syndicate user-generated actions including ratings, reviews, comments, and uploads to the Yahoo network. This will channel in more referral traffic back to their sites considering the number of user eyeballs that the various Yahoo content sites get monthly.
In comparison, the Yahoo/JS-Kit user experience is at once quite usable and full-featured. You can experiment the implementation on this page.