Be receptive! Be open to each and every type of user input for authentication.
Universal sign on
Luis Farzati's Smart Identity sign on widget
This very-user-centric identification approach leverages the many open APIs now available for most web services. Feel free to select your user name-of-choice!
@Twitter user name- Facebook.com/
user name user name@gmail.com- YouTube.com/
user name user name.wordpress.comoruser name.wordpress.orgblog URL- Flickr.com/
user name user name@yahoo.com- Open ID URL
- more?
In this blog post, developer Luis Farzati emphasizes that:
the objective is to allow the user to input whatever wanted [in order] to login… If it exists as a valid username out here, we’ll find it and suggest it!
Proof-of-concept
I think the motivation for this was to facilitate user transition and comfort with the URL-based format of Open ID. A demo is available here. Luis named it The Smart Identity Resolver Widget, licensed under CC/license/by-sa/3.0 unported. I tried it. The widget easily found my Twitter and YouTube user names. It did not work with my Open ID URL. But Open ID requires a bit of fussing, the first time I use it in a slightly different context.
Do be aware that I found this via Chris Messina‘s Friend Feed stream several months ago. Chris is an open social advocate and Google employee. That is of some reassurance. This should be secure, though one must always exercise caution if asked for a password.
The code is open source, on Github. I had a look around. My impression was that Luis is using REST with OAuth to OpenID providers, or calls to APIs depending on the service. This enables the universal sign in to return the powerful visual cue of one’s own avatar. I noticed that GetSatisfaction had some sort of intermediate role, which was puzzling. Otherwise, it was straightforward, decently-commented JavaScript that I could sort of understand.
Assortment of user profiles returned for sign on
The Smart Identity effort was intended as proof-of-concept ONLY. Luis makes that very clear in the README. Also, there are two forks, Master and G-H. The latter includes an implementation of the universal sign on for FriendFeed. The G-H branch might be interesting to someone who could understand it!
I felt a little sad when I noticed that the repository had no commits since late-April 2011. This idea clearly generated some interest. It is quite appealing from a user-centric point-of-view. Yet something may come of it eventually, as Luis’s Smart Identity Widget repository has 17 people following it on Github.
