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The reason people pick Facebook only is because they think that losing users that don't use Facebook is better than having to implement your own account system.

Authorization and account management is really easy to screw up. If you leave it to Facebook, you'll save a lot of time. The only question is whether or not it's worth it.



I'm gone if I visit your site.

Or, if I'm not, I've polluted your user database with one of my throw-away Facebook accounts just so I could see what was behind that search result that caught my eye.

userid, password. What part of that do you not understand?


Surely there's a way to avoid implementing your own account system that doesn't drag in the massive unrelated architecture of a Facebook, Google, or Twitter. You don't even need SSO like OpenID.

Is there a company that just sells a no-frills user enrollment and login service and also provides strict isolation between sites? (I.e., they resist the temptation to leverage their aggregate user base.)


Mozilla wants to do it for free with BrowserID[1].

[1] https://browserid.org/


Wouldn't that pretty much describe any open id provider?


Well, when I look at http://openid.net/get-an-openid/ I see Google, Yahoo, Livejornal, Hayes, Blogger, Flikr, Orange, Mixi, MySpace, Wordpress, AOL...

There are six 'simple' providers listed. Spot checking: One of them has broken SSL (https://www.myopenid.com/signup sources https://api-secure.recaptcha.net which has an invalid certificate). One of them looks completely broken for new accounts: http://claimid.com/register "This account is hidden or does not exist."

And of course there's this: http://www.untrusted.ca/cache/openid.html which describes various security and privacy problems with OpenID.




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