Yet Another Sign Up

A friend recommended Pocket today. Tried to sign up, got this screen:

As I was filling in my details, I felt a strange feeling. Something is wrong. According to Wikipedia:

As of December 2009, there are over 1 billion OpenID enabled accounts on the Internet (see below) and approximately 9 million sites have integrated OpenID consumer support.

Guys, these are statistics from 3 years ago. How is it that it’s 2012 and I still have to make yet another useless user account? Even Jeff Atwood’s excellent post about Open ID is almost 2 years old now, and it seemed little has changed. Yes, there are more and services that use Open ID, but our progress seems linear as opposed to my expected “Open ID, cool idea FUCK IT’S EVERYWHERE” kind of experience.  So what can we do about this? Not much. I decided to do the least I can do, and wrote the following email to Pocket support:

Hey Guys,

I got a lot of recommendations for your service, and today I decided to try it and sign up. However, I noticed I need to create a special username and password just for using Pocket!

I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but there’s an excellent system that allows websites to authenticate their users without keeping their password information, called Open ID. It makes the signup and login process easier and faster. I recommend you take a look, because as a user, I try to avoid registering too many accounts on the web.

If you need any help regarding this, feel free to reply to this email. If you already considered Open ID and decided not to use it, I would love to hear why! So please, write me back.

Yours truly,

  Amir Rachum

UPDATE

Ok, I have GOT to give it up to the Pocket people, because I got a super fast response to my email:

Hi Amir,

Thanks for contacting Pocket Support, and for the suggestion about Open ID!

At the moment, we are using a login system that has been in use for a few years, from back when we were Read It Later. We recognize that the Sign Up process isn’t the most seamless experience, and are looking to streamline it in the future. We are considering Open ID, as well as a few other alternatives.

We appreciate the feedback, and hope that you are enjoying Pocket thus far!

Best,
 Justin
Pocket