SSO Is The Future
Well, I am sitting here with my whiskey and reading blog posts, and I’ve decided that SSO (single sign-on) is definitely the way forward. I recently tried to comment on a friend’s blog (a brilliant post!) but on commenting was greeted with a “please register” message. This just ticks me off.
Why, in this day and age, do people want to make money / popularity / whatever by REQUIRING you to register? I have so many logins to remember as it stands… Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In (thank you TweetDeck, you ROCK!), Think Bike, MyADSL, and and and and and…. I don’t know about you, but I have ended up with quite a few passwords that I use in almost a rotation basis. Out of all of these, I have gained my “favourites”;
Think Bike, a niche forum, of which I’m involved in various subsections of it, including traffic marshalling and support services.
Facebook, is well, Facebook. Its the 21st century ID number and you pretty much have to have one. If you don’t, enjoy being left behind, particularly with recent patent awards…
Twitter, my little one-liner rant/share/cool/funky/link/share page which is nothing without Tweetdeck or Echofon…
Linked-In, something I’ve started getting into, the best spot to mingle with like-minded business people.
MyADSL, if you’re a South African and battle with your internet, this is your first stop.
I’ve digressed… I wanted to post and was required to register. Why? There is so much content being served on the Interwebz, why on earth would you want to capitalise on something, even if it is just gaining registrants, by restricting it! The best example of this and my thoughts towards it, would be something written by David Thorne (if you browse stuff or receive emails you should know the name) titled Simon’s pie charts…
Signing up for things is old, outdated and unnecessary. Getting back to the SSO side of things, I have recently (at work) been working on an SSO project relating to sign-ins. I wasn’t really aware of any of this SSO stuff before , but realised I myself was using it with Google’s various applications. It’s amazing how it sneaks up on you! Did you know that you are using the same login for the following things:
- GMail
- GTalk
- Google Analytics
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Blogger.com
- Google Docs
- YouTube
Yeah so I guess the Google prefix gives them away, apart from YouTube and Blogger. This blog uses the MyScoop aggregator, which uses something fantastic, the ability to sign in with another account of yours via rpxnow.com! This is a good idea, and as far as I’m aware from a newbie standpoint, a perfect example of SSO. This allows you to sign in with your Google, Twitter, Facebook, Blogger (part of Google), Yahoo! or OpenID account instead of creating a new login (with new password, new spam and new username to remember). There is the option to create a new username, which is a great option too, for whoever hasn’t got ANY of the other accounts… This opens the door to any site without a ‘G’ in their prefix to use a single login!
The concept of SSO is just brilliant, imagine how much time you would save by not having to remember all your logins for all your sites? Hmmm, come to think of it, when does one IM take over everything? What are your thoughts on a unified login for everything?
SSO is definitely the way to go… over and above the hassle of remembering all the passwords – think of all the time saved. Sure – its a few seconds here… a few seconds there… but it all adds up. Thats also assuming all goes well.. the real annoyance to me is when you forget a password. and need to reset it… then its a matter of remembering what email address its registered with… or answering a question which 10 years ago you thought you’d never forget, yet for some reason you can no longer remember your great grandmothers cats nickname… lol.
also – what real value do most of these places get from forcing you to sign up before allowing you to do whatever it is youre trying to do? I mean sure, in some cases its required – but is it really neccesary *ALL* the time? I believe this method can in many cases be considered short sighted and as Ross suggests, end up more of a deterrant.
anyhoo – SSO for president!
single sign-ons are VERY convenient, and today, convenience is attractive. PS: Thanks for the mention of myScoop
Look into OpenID to see how others are driving to solve the (lack of universal) SSO pain http://openid.net/