Time for old-school sign-up forms to die.
Seriously, aren’t you tired to see the same fields you have to enter information into every time you are visiting a new service? Aren’t you fed up with thinking of new passwords? Let’s be fair, most of the time you are just sticking to the same password as you are too lazy to think of new ones. What is more important, you won’t be able to remember which password should be used exactly at which website.
Don’t shout the “OpenID” word. Does your mom know what the hell this means and how can she use it? Now you are telling me there is Clickpass? Right, go figure how to sign in with that tool… if you can, of course.
I see advocates of OpenID standing up and telling how much progress has been done, and that’s almost every major internet player has transformed their logins into OpenIDs. However, not a single of them accepts another OpenID as a natural login method into their system. If I have a Google account, why should I create a Yahoo! one to use their services? Please mind, that both your Google account and Yahoo! one are OpenIDs now.
Oh, and there is this big one screw-up I can see on many sites nowadays: they offer an old-school login and an OpenID. How should I remember if I have used an OpenID during registration (if it existed back then) or not? So I have to try login with my OpenID, and if it fails, use ordinary credentials.
That’s simply a mess and we need (and will!) proceed to a united single Sign-on:
Twitter is doing a great job and lets you sign in through OAuth into various apps. However, it doesn’t provide that level of flexibility, that an OpenID provider does. E.g. myopenid lets you have several IDs (business, personal, friends), and sing on behalf of created online personalities. All the information you’ve entered into your myopenid will be shared with an application you sign in to, so you don’t have to repeatedly enter your date of birth for example. Facebook connect also allows you to share all the info with the external applications, however, here you have no privacy at all, if it’s not a fake Facebook profile.
The bright example of a new login system can be seen at a Russian start-up filmfeed:
You have to login using your Google, Facebook or OpenID. It’s great! You are welcomed at the site and can start using it right away, with no need to enter info, get puzzled with sophisticated captchas, share your email address, think of new strong password, store it somewhere, receive confirmation emails and click links to approve your identity.
Web services have the tools ready to be used, however, not many are participating or even trying to implement simple sign-up system for their users. Big corporations are locking the data out, not willing to share it with rivals, which adds up to the general online schizophrenia we all have now. But it’s a high time for a change. Are you ready?