Thanks to APIs, social media and OpenID, the consumer truly has ‘single sign-on’ across multiple services.

Thanks to APIs, social media and OpenID, the consumer truly has single ‘sign-on’ across multiple services. Rather than expecting users to store and remember multiple passwords, registration can be set up to leverage their relationship with social media sites they know and trust.

Like the API used by Twitter which allows users to directly import contacts from other social media sites, APIs can authenticate users within seconds by letting the user log in with their favourite social media account.

 

Registration is painful

Registration has for a long been a barrier to casual visitors. When attempting to download a PDF, buy a product or post a comment, they are confronted by a nasty pop-up demanding they register.

For a casuals visitor, this is an enormous investment of time, and they may be reluctant to part with their email address if they do not trust the website's privacy policy. This equates to lesser products sold, fewer comments on blogs, and fewer conversations in forums.

With single sign-on, users can comment on blogs, purchase via e-commerce and converse on forums, without the necessity to remember new passwords or give-away their email address.

 

OpenID and APIs

OpenID is an open standard that is being adopted to bring us all closer to the vision of single sign-on.

Be aware that many consumers have an OpenID account. Although much of the open source community has built plugins for Word Press, Drupal LiveJournal, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google that are OpenID compliant, users are just beginning to embrace it.

This problem can be overcome by creating individual APIs which authenticate the user directly with a social media site.

 

Privacy and security

This is a smart solution to an age-old problem. Although it is as secure as having a gmail login, the finance industry may not be so quick to embrace the technology.

Legal compliance issues may forbid them to use OpenID or similar methods of authentification.

Organisations like American Express, may consider moving all their customer passwords to a central controlled facility, like Activ Identity.

Here, a cardmember can use the same login to manage their monthly repayments and login to offer sites.