Yahoo drops third-party logins, will soon require Yahoo IDs.

If you utilize your Google or Facebook credentials to sign into Yahoo services, you will soon be out of luck: The corporate said it’ll end this process and require everyone to apply a Yahoo ID instead.

“Yahoo is consistently engaged on improving the user experience,” a Yahoo spokesperson said in a press release. “This new process, which now asks users to register with a Yahoo username, will let us offer one of the best personalized experience to everyone.”

Yahoo will make the change gradually, and has already begun with Yahoo Sports Tourney Pick ‘Em, a service for school basketball fans, just in time for March Madness. Other popular Yahoo services on deck include photo-sharing site Flickr and Fantasy Sports. Yahoo didn’t provide a timetable for when these and its other Web properties would make the switch.

[Some Yahoo users got greater than they bargained for. Read Yahoo Recycled Emails: Users Find Security Surprises.]

Former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz opened Yahoo services to people using third-party credentials in 2011 to tap into competitors’ enormous user bases with hopes of accelerating traffic to the company’s own sites. Current Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer’s reversal of this sends a transparent message: Yahoo plans to highlight personalization to enhance user experience, and ultimately, advertising.

That message has rung true in a few changes Meyer has seen through since she joined Yahoo in 2012. Within the last two years, the corporate has launched redesigns of Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Finance. It also announced a few acquisitions and initiatives at CES, including news summary app Yahoo News Digest, image-heavy websites Yahoo Tech and Yahoo Food, and reworked advertising offerings.

Yahoo also launched a controversial recycled email program last year, which reassigned Yahoo IDs that were dormant for greater than a year. Recipients of those recycled email addresses reported receiving personal messages — equivalent to phone bills, checking account statements, and social network login information — intended for the previous email account holder. Yahoo later launched a Not My Email button to go back such email.

Because Yahoo will soon require all users to register with a Yahoo ID, you could have two options: You may subscribe to a brand new one on its main login page otherwise you can try and revive an old login you could have once had.

If you find that your old Yahoo username was recycled, you can attempt to claim it. Visit watchlist.yahoo.com, where you’re able to enter as much as five Yahoo usernames. Make sure you enter your former username within the top spot. If nobody has claimed your old login, Yahoo will reassign it to you. If someone has claimed it, you’re out of luck. Yahoo will place you on a wait list for 3 years should the present user abandon it. Yahoo will charge you $1.99 for this service.

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Kristin Burnham currently serves as InformationWeek.com’s Senior Editor, covering social media, social business, IT leadership and IT careers. Previous to joining InformationWeek in July 2013, she served in a couple of roles at CIO magazine and CIO.com, most recently as senior … View Full Bio

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