As part of its plan to return to the big league, Yahoo has decided to cut support for third-party logins. Soon enough everyone enjoying Yahoo services will have to sign-up for a Yahoo account as they won’t be able to login with their Facebook and Google IDs.
The change, which will be rolled out gradually, will start with Yahoo Sports Tourney Pick’Em, a service focused on the NCAA college basketball tournament which begins later this month. Other services like Fantasy Sports and Flickr will follow shortly afterwards.
“Yahoo is continually working on improving the user experience,” the company said in a statement, noting that the new process “will allow us to offer the best personalized experience to everyone”.
Last year, the company announced a program to “recycle” inactive Yahoo user IDs, letting new users claim email addresses that have not been used for more than 12 months.
As Reuters has noted, by eliminating the Facebook and Google sign-in features, Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive, is effectively reversing a strategy that Yahoo adopted in 2010 and 2011 under then CEO Carol Bartz…