[alain94040]

"one of the worst executed visions of all times" What could have been done better?

I'll tell you what it should look like (the fact that it's impossible is not the point): whenever I land on a site that asks me to login, I get a menu of all my possible accounts, I pick one, and I'm in. End of the story.

Kind of like Dropbox being simple and intuitive when everyone else was building overly complex stuff.

[jacquesm]

Ok, it's impossible. Now tell me how you're going to do it anyway and laugh all the way to the bank.

The fact that you can conceive of it means that it likely isn't impossible, merely very difficult and possibly non-obvious. But that's how pretty much every real success story starts. You really may be on to something here.

[mbrubeck]

This could be possible if web browsers (not just web sites) were aware of the standard and participated in the UI flow. Mozilla Labs prototyped something along these lines (not targeted for inclusion in Firefox 4, but possibly for the next release):

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/account-manager-coming-to-f...

[brlewis]

Can't be impossible since it was done: http://www.clickpass.com/

Nice implementation, poor sales/marketing.

[petenixey]

It's kind of you to say but the reason our sales and marketing was poor was that we couldn't figure out what we were selling or marketing. Try as we might we couldn't figure out who really wanted it and where to make money.

Most websites simply can't see enough of a bang for an engineering buck they could be spending on something else (i.e. they don't even want to install it, never mind pay for it) and if it's done well consumers don't even see it so there's no money to be had from them either.

I'm sure we could have made it all slicker still but even Facebook login takes some justification and Clickpass didn't deliver anything like the value that that does.

[brlewis]

For early adopters who try out lots of different sites, Clickpass would be a big win for both the users and the sites. Once the early adopters are doing it, everybody else will see the convenience.

[kenjackson]

The potential problem with this solution, although I do like it, is that your accounts can be attacked by someone who has any one of your login/pw combinations. You must treat them all as equally valuable. I'm not sure people on the web are at that point yet.

With that said... isn't that really like OpenId?

[jokermatt999]

Isn't this kind of what Blogspot does? I'm not very firm on the background, but generally when I go to post a comment on a Blogspot/Blooger site, I'm given a choice of either my Google account or OpenID, with openID being a choice of several favicons (Yahoo, Google again, etc).