Solving the need to create lots of separate accounts
Julian Cole describes one way of solving the problem of having to set up new accounts for lots of different websites - MyBower set up an account for his club themselves. Here’s some more ways lots of web services are solving this problem:
1. Get acquired by Google (see Paul Graham’s article, The Future Of Web Startups).
2. Get acquired by Yahoo. Not as good as Google, but you take what you can get.
3. Get acquired by Microsoft. Avoid at all costs
[These three work because these three companies have networks where you only need to sign up once and it’s easy to add another service to your account.]
4. Make it really easy to sign up. Tumblr do an excellent job of this - their front page says “Sign up in 10 second”, and then they follow through. I wasn’t sure if I was going to use this service or not when I signed up, but because it was so quick and easy, I thought I might as well try it out - great marketing on the part of Tumblr here!
5. Make signing in unnecessary for as much of your site as possible. For example, you don’t need to sign in to be able to comment on this blog using Disqus.
6. OpenID - Most blog sites (excluding, unfortunately, the Disqus commenting system this one uses!), and many other sites, use OpenID, which allows users to use many sites with a single account.
