Yahoo’s announced a new integration with widget maker JS-Kit. The partnership brings Yahoo IDs to JS-Kits multi-platform sign-on widget. This means people with Yahoo accounts will be able to leave comments or ratings using their Yahoo identity along  with Facebook, OpenID, and JS-Kit.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb calls this a serious challenge to Facebook connect, but it seems more like a consensus. Yahoo sees the push toward social integration across the web as an important trend and is making strides to integrate with the large developers already out there. Yahoo should do the same with Disqus. Currently Yahoo’s own platform doesn’t have a lot of apps, nor a lot of participation. Apps in their directory have around 50 to 1,000 visits.

Yahoo will be a contender with Facebook when they open up Yahoo application like MyYahoo or email to third party developers and embrace key content publishers with preferential treatment and Yahoo ID integration.