

Accounts get in the way of startups working together - a4agarwal
http://sachin.posterous.com/accounts-get-in-the-way

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chime
It is so easy to enable Google, Facebook Connect, Twitter, and Hotmail account
logins for your site that it makes absolutely no sense to roll your own.
Instead of rolling your own features like login, signup, forgot-my-password,
confirm-email etc., just implement the above for your sites from the get go.
OpenID is good too but I've found almost nobody uses that to log into my
sites. 75% are Gmail/Google, 20% Facebook, and rest are Twitter and MSN.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
Hold on there. We added RPX (wraps Google, FB, Twitter, etc, etc) signup/login
in addition to our username/password and the response has been...unexpected.
We still have well over 50% of people sign up with username/password instead
of RPX. I had expected a huge shift, but it didn't happen.

Sure, maybe some of those _would_ have used RPX if that were the only thing we
had, but apparently they still prefer a username.

Going 100% with the 3rd party logins is a tricky route. It's impossible to
know how many potential signups you're losing.

~~~
sadiq
Not to mention that you're potentially putting a very crucial part of your
company infrastructure in to the hands of another company whose interests are
probably not aligned with yours.

What happens to your startup if (though unlikely) in six months time Twitter
decides to start charging for authentication or different levels of service?

Something to consider.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
Yes, definitely an issue. If RPX disappears, we'd be in a world of hurt. I'm
willing to take that chance, but they've really got us in a vice.

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callmeed
_"If you want another company to use your services, then you need to make it
easy."_

Or, make a service that's so good, enough people _demand_ integration.

This article makes some good points but I think things change once you start
talking about startups that charge money ... and the Typekit example he gives
is proof. It's the one paid service he lists–it doesn't use RPX, FB connect,
etc.

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lr
This is a really great post. Why more startups don't use something like RPX
from JanRain is beyond me.

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moolave
Seamless access is definitely one feature I appreciate the most.

