I think providing Facebook/Twitter logins for other social media sites make a lot of sense. Want to login to post on Yelp? Done. Want to checkin at 4sq? Gotcha.

But using those services to check into the applications running your business? Fuck no. I'm certainly not going to let anyone depend on their ability to get paying work done by whether Twitter is up or not. And I know of plenty of people who aren't interested in mixing their private-life Facebook with their work-life accounts.

Then of course there's Google. I'd be weary to let a large number of customers be owned by that Gorilla.

OpenID was promising because it was an open standard, not controlled by any one party. But unfortunately it had the usability of your average open source project (acceptable for hackers, terrible for anyone else).

Facebook has a registration tool, too, now: http://swombat.com/2011/1/24/facebook-registration-tool

This might be the good middle ground between facebook login and an entirely new login... a facebook-assisted signup procedure.

Google Account auth is nice too. It actually uses OpenID in the background, but the user doesn't have to understand what OpenID is. As it should be.

So the worlds biggest advertiser knows that it's the same you on stackoverflow, linkedin and 'very small penis porn com"

Hmm nice !

I actually like this model too ... you're never going to get everybody to use one provider for storing their identities, because nobody will go and create one unless they absolutely need to.

So, it makes sense to go where users are. What I think needs to be done is standardize an api for the sites like twitter, facebook, Google and who-knows-what-in-the-future to use in providing accessing to user information to developers ...

That way, when superdupersocialnetworking.com explodes and has 1 billion users, providing sign on access to its users for your app is as simple as changing one or two lines of code.

That would be really awesome

> What I think needs to be done is standardize an api for the sites like twitter, facebook, Google and who-knows-what-in-the-future to use in providing accessing to user information to developers

It is my understanding that that's pretty much exactly what OpenID is.

a. Open ID is a protocol not an api ... I'm talking about something more akin to the old way twitter used to verify twitter logins in their api b. Open ID deals mainly with authentication ... I'm talking about both authenticating and providing access to limited user information ... email, name, phone ... that sort of thing.

I just think Open ID was over elaborate, I'm hoping something simpler could succeed where it has failed. Hope that makes sense.

You think OpenID was over elaborate but want to provide the user's phone number?

You're missing the point. I'm advocating for a general direction ... I don't have specifics..

Its not crazy. Facebook just announced something along those lines today http://marketaire.com/2010/12/23/facebook-registration-tool/

> Its not crazy. Facebook just announced something along those lines today

Yep, and it's not exactly a standardized API, neither would it be easy to move a system built on this to the next greatest thing from Twitter or Google. User data lock-in is nice like that.