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games design mmo signup processes Web 0.1

Web 0.1: Blogger.com and “identity”

This is getting ridiculous. I just tried to post a comment on someone’s blogger.com blog, and I was forced to use either my gmail account or an OpenID account to post. When I tried to NOT use my gmail account, it force-logged-me-out of gmail in the other window! This is pretty incompetent.

Note to web companies: the days when normal people only had one online identity died ten years ago. We all have multiple identities today. Leave us alone, let us get on with our lives, and stop interfering with who we are and who we express ourselves as being.

(this was one of the more interesting challenges I hit upon at NCsoft when analysing how Social Networks / Web 2.0 / social gaming were going to affect our games: so few people in the company realised the multiple-identity thing was going on (even though most of them had 2 or 3 discrete identities!), and so many of the systems we were building/had built had no support for multiple identities per real-life person. When phrased properly, it became easy to see how disparate major problems we had with a variety of systems were actually the same root problem of enforced identity)

People will work around this kind of stupidity from internet companies, they always do: I already have to use 2 web browsers to get around this kind of problem occasionally (needing to be logged in as two accounts simultaneously, e.g. one to gmail and a different one to adsense) – if it gets much worse, I might have to start using Chrome too so that I can have a third.

But it feels such a shame that we still see this kind of shortsightedness…