Yahoo has launched a beta version of their OpenID provider initiative, which was announced earlier this month. Starting today, you can use your Yahoo credentials to login on a number of different sites, including Plaxo, Jyte, and Pibb (full list here).

I tried it out on Plaxo, and it’s definitely an improvement over previous integrations of OpenID. Versus needing to enter a URL such as username.myopenid.com before providing your username and password, you simply follow a “sign in with Yahoo ID” link, where you can enter your Yahoo credentials. Several pages of education on how exactly your Yahoo ID can be used to sign into other web sites follows, and from there you simply sign up for Plaxo and can then use your Yahoo credentials to sign in on future visits.

Now that I’ve seen it in action, I feel like Yahoo’s effort may be fairly effective in driving OpenID adoption. To mainstream users, OpenID is probably a completely foreign concept. On the other hand, seeing the Yahoo brand with no explicit mention of OpenID is a concept users should be able to grasp, and Yahoo has gone through great lengths to educate users throughout the sign-in process. Most everyone out there has a Yahoo ID, and given the choice of yet another username and password or using your existing Yahoo one, I think users may start to opt for the latter.

Kudos to Yahoo for getting this out quickly. Now we'll see if they take the next step and start allowing users to sign into various Yahoo services with the OpenID provider of their choice.