Hi all
The primary advantage of not using email address as the sole unique
key is that it allows for someone to have multiple email addresses
associated with their identity. This is a lot more common than you
might expect. Many sites now allow for multiple email addresses to be
associated with a person, eg linkedin and yahoo. Typically one email
address is primary and used for communication between the site and
individual.
Another benefit, it enables discovery of a person by friends and work
colleagues.
eg
j...@gmail.com
joe.sm...@company.com
j.sm...@previous.com
All three of these are valid identifiers for Joe, but some people will
know him as a friend, some as a work colleague and some from his
previous employer.
The downside is that a screen name is often required to represent the
person on the site, eg zzgavin, my handle on twitter (http://twitter.com/zzgavin
is a manifestation of it) represents me instead of my email address,
giving me privacy and avoiding spambots, but at the expense of another
identifier to remember.
Identity representation is best done via a screen name
identity validation (login) can be either primary email or screen
name, allow both as an access mechanism. Screen name maps to a unique
email address, one that has been verified and is primary. The email
address maps to a unique internal ID which gives the means of logging
in.
OpenID is a useful approach too, but the screen name arguments apply
too, as you often need a unique handle to refer to people with. Also
many people don't think they have an OpenID, so you will need to
support email anyway.
We've been looking at this a lot recently at work (nature.com)
thanks
Gavin
On 29 Jan 2009, at 03:35, Mark Johnston wrote:
Would love to hear peoples thoughts on the whole ID vs Email address
for registration or signing into a website. We have been debating
and discussing things for a good while at work to come up with the
most accepted/usable low barrier to entry system that we can
conceive for our customers to interact with us.
Unfortunately when looking around it is pretty much a 50/50 with
what the rest of the web are doing. Has anybody done any research or
have opinions for the pros and cons for each device? It really is a
sticking point for a lot of people in the business right now with
everybody having their preferred method.
Mark Johnston
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