Now, users will be able to share articles, leave comments and play fantasy sports on Yahoo by signing in to accounts they’ve created on Facebook and Google. They won’t have to create a Yahoo profile or associate their Facebook or Google ID with an existing Yahoo one (though a Yahoo account is being created in the background that’s associated with the other site’s credentials).

Other properties included in the new login regime (or lack of a regime) are Yahoo! Finance, as well as pages for users to rate movies, music and restaurants. (Obviously for some properties, like Yahoo! Mail, users will still need to plug in Yahoo-specific credentials to create a full-fledged Yahoo ID.)

The beleaguered company is playing this as a move toward openness. And there is some precedent for the move. Yahoo had previously allowed users to log in to Flickr using OpenID logins from Google, and had partnered with Facebook to give users an option, through Facebook Connect, to integrate their accounts on the two sites and send information back and forth between them.

But this latest announcement is different from Facebook Connect; what Yahoo is now offering is a wholesale substitution of another site’s account system. Yahoo for a long time had the coveted advantage as a Web portal of having a large percentage of its visitors logged in at all times to a consistent account across all its properties; that doesn’t seem to be a top priority for the company anymore.

Facebook said the issue only affected a “fraction of a percentage” of the social network’s users, and they fixed it within hours. The company also deleted all the ID information that some people sent in.

But the incident raised an interesting question: Why was Facebook asking for real-world IDs in the first place?

Unlike some other social networks, Facebook takes pride (and pitches advertisers) on the idea that its users present their real-world selves. But the ID request isn’t part of a broader effort to verify users’ identities–something that sites in countries such as China sometimes do.

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But different Twitter developers have different needs for Twitter data, and different abilities to pay. The company has adopted a graded approach to allow developers access to its users’ tweets. Don’t have the big bucks to pay for the Firehose? Sign up for the cleverly named Gardenhose access level, which gets you 10 percent of public statuses for free but requires case-by-case approval by Twitter. Just want to get in and start playing around without waiting to be whitelisted? Try the Spritzer, which is available to any user and provides roughly 1 percent of public statuses.

(According to folks at Twitter, the awesome naming convention is the handiwork of tech lead John Kalucki. Also, the Gardenhose and Spritzer used to have a stronger spray, as it were; developers could previously get as much as 20 percent of tweets for free. But now that Twitter’s up to 95 million tweets per day, that portion was getting too big.)

What does it cost to drink from the Firehose? That depends. Twitter’s pricing plans appear to vary wildly, from the big search companies on down to folks prototyping a brainstorm. Multiple Twitter developers told me they felt Twitter’s pricing seemed to be totally arbitrary, and based on whatever Twitter thought they’d be able to pay.

Twitter business development guy Doug Williams said it’s true that Twitter has no structured way to price access between the 10 percent of the Gardenhose and the 100 percent of the Firehose, though the company is likely to develop more levels of pricing.

“Twitter is focused on creating consumer products and we’re not built to license data,” Williams said, adding, “Twitter has always invested in the ecosystem and startups and we believe that a lot of innovation can happen on top of the data. Pricing and terms definitely vary by where you are from a corporate perspective.”

It’s not only how big you are, but what you do with the data. According to a developer, analytics players are asked to pay the most, because they take Twitter content but don’t contribute it or drive content to Twitter. Those who display and process content in a way that drives traffic pay less, and those who help generate content pay the least. As I understand it, some developers who make Twitter clients don’t pay anything at all for streaming API access.

As of July, Twitter said it had given 15-20 developers/product access to the Firehose; the company declined to disclose the current number.

Twitter is also supposedly going to soon start giving away a free analytics dashboard for brands and other users. It’s not clear how much that will compete with existing premium Twitter analytics products that other companies offer.

Williams described the Gardenhose as something academics might use to do research, but I’ve talked to at least one company that makes a mobile app that displays topical Twitter content and feels the free Gardenhose is good enough for its needs. And it’s the right price.

If developers need something more specific than a random sampling of statuses, they can also access filtered content through the streaming API–for instance, tracking keywords, following user IDs and returning tweets from a specific location. There’s also a three-level partner program there. The base level for filtering by user ID is “default,” followed by the approval-required “shadow” and the paying-partner level “birddog,” said Williams. I prefer the cute stream metaphors.

Image courtesy Minnesota National Guard on Picasa.

Some “apps,” the small programs that let users play games or share information with each other on the social-networking site, were sending users’ Facebook ID numbers to third-party marketing or data firms, in violation of Facebook’s privacy policies. An ID can be used to look up a user’s name and other publicly available information on the social network and link it to their use of the app. Such information can be used by companies that build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities.

Facebook didn’t identify the data broker that was buying user IDs. But it said it had reached an agreement with RapLeaf Inc., which it described as “the data broker who came forward to work with us on this situation.” It’s unclear whether Facebook is implicating RapLeaf and neither company responded to questions.

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The first: iLife ’09. iPhoto now offers a new feature called Faces, which categorizes photos by faces. The software uses a technology called “face detection” to ID the subjects of photos. It asks you to identify the subjects first and then scans the remainder of your photos; using face recognition, it identifies other photos in which those subjects appear.

Another new iPhoto feature: Places. It does the obvious. Using the GPS geotagging built into newer cameras and “the best cellphone in the world,” iPhoto identifies the location at which photos were taken and categorizes them accordingly. What about photos that don’t include those geotags? Manual entry solves that problem with a little help from Google Maps.

Apple has also added Facebook and Flickr support to iPhoto. Set up your accounts in iPhoto and the software will automatically send your photos to those services and allow your Facebook friends to tag them if you so choose. Beyond these features, iPhoto includes a slick new slideshow and book themes.

A man hiking in a remote part of Mammoth Lakes in California’s Sierra Nevada found a pilot’s license and an FAA card, both bearing the name of aviator Steve Fossett.

Authorities are now trying to verify the IDs and other items for authenticity. No human remains or plane pieces were found nearby so far, although a fleece pullover and some money were also retrieved in the same area.

The discovery is about 50 miles away from Nevada desert locations where teams had been searching for the well-known adventurer, who vanished while on a solo flight in a single-engine Bellanca Super Decathlon a year ago.

It has been assumed that Fossett, who has since been declared legally dead, crashed, and the search for him was suspended a month ago.

After Fossett’s disappearance, tens of thousands of Web users mounted an unusual online search mission, studying satellite photographs of a huge swath of ground.

The images were uploaded by Amazon (AMZN) to its Mechanical Turk, in an attempt to find a possible crash site.

Google Earth (GOOG) was also used in the effort, which is called “crowdsourcing.”

The Turk was also used in another unsuccessful search for Microsoft (MSFT) techie Jim Gray, who went missing on a boat off the coast of California.

Computer-aided image-scanning technology has also been used in the search for Fossett, to no avail, until this very old-school break was made.