Needed a spreadsheet, so tried to sign up for Zoho using my Yahoo! Open ID. Odd that it only seems to support Google and Yahoo as providers, but worse that it totally falls over when I refuse to share profile information through the Open ID transaction.

Yahoo’s provider offers to send them my secret, never used Yahoo email address. There’s no granular controls, so, I deny the whole lot by clicking ‘Don’t Share and Continue’, expecting to find an empty profile form to fill in on the other side.

Instead, I got an inexplicable fatal error because Yahoo did not directly provide an email address. I choose to provide my email address to you myself.

I quit and went to use a different app. This is user experience engineering at its worst, the very antithesis of writing robust code, which on the web is vital, and as we decentralise and allow our services to become co-dependent on one other, you have to do it right.

Error was:

E-mail address is not returned from Yahoo OpenID Provider. Please retry login to Zoho and select “Share and Continue” button in the Yahoo “OpenID Review and Confirm” page. This is required only for your first time login to Zoho via this YahooID. For subsequent logins you can login to Zoho seamlessly even if you select “Don’t Share and Continue” option.