Fight for Your Right to Login
One of, if not the biggest concern facing today’s social web relates to the login process. The amount of social networks and services one can sign up for on the web today is quite staggering (just take a look at Friendfeed’s offering of services, they have about sixty). And as any social media enthusiast knows, it is all too common to lose track of one’s account information, opening up a username/email/password combination challenge. Well, lucky for us, we have some people trying to remedy this dilemma. Some pretty smart ones at that.
Individuals from Facebook, Google, MySpace, and Plaxo, among others, gathered together Tuesday to work out the issue of a universal login. At the heart of this movement is the OpenID Foundation, an open source model dedicated to eliminate the need for multiple usernames 
across different websites. It’s a matter of simplifying the user experience, and it’s nice to see companies put their differences aside in order to work towards the common good.
The issue of a universal login is a HUGE deal to say the least. A universal login allows a user to bring their unique social graph and data around with them while surfing the net, referred to as data portability. Web brands are already scrambling to get their piece of the data portability pie. For example, Google recently rolled out their new Friend Connect Social Bar, and Facebook Connect is slowly being integrated onto more and more sites across the web. It begs the question: “Do these web services even need OpenID?”
Google's Friend Connect Social Bar
The ongoing universal login deliberation is a very loaded topic, one that I’ll be sure to follow. It is still rather experimental and a bit too early to accurately speculate at this stage. But I will say this: Depending upon the decisions made at meetings like the one held on Tuesday, the future of web interaction and data portability likely lies in the hands of these great technical engineers. Let’s hope that the decisions made bring forth the greater good (neutral/3rd party) instead of the greatest one (the bigger social network).
