Too many websites require login to view content?

I agree, its bloody annoying. It would be soo much easier if there was a centralised location, where we need create just one userid, and webmasters can check that using freely available APIs.

Whats more annoying is the fact that i have over 10 different loyalty cards for different superstores.

I do think Newsvine is a somewhat special case, not every news web site allows you to post new articles, discuss any and everything that's published, and run your own personal 'Column', all in one place! I can understand why regular newspapers do it, and there's the odd one I actually agree with in terms of requiring a username and password (guardian.co.uk) - my Guardian Unlimited site login allows consolidation across the site, the messageboards, I can save articles, if I paid for it, I could read the entire newspaper online every day in their Digital Print form, but most of the sites just do it for tracking purposes (NYTimes, etc)...

... I can live with it for the time being, I just use the same username for every site wherever possible, but I do agree it's a bit unnecessary for most otherwise-publicly-available content.

www.bugmenot.com is very good for getting logins to sites. Sadly however, since this became well known, people have logged in with these details and then changed the password etc, rendering a lot of the logins on bugmenot.com redundant. There are still a fair few working ones though, which come in handy from time to time.

The whole thing about registering though, is purely so companies or websites have your details on file, in case they need to market their products. Ok so some people opt out of email "updates" but there will still be people who do not, and it does not cost the site anything to require a login.

the future maybe someone does try to create some unified ID, it will never be truly unified but if they can get some of the bigger sites on board it could be possitive for many of the sites involved. And I think in the future we will be seeing more pay sites too. Micro payments will be the new @!$%# in a few years... pay a few cents per visit to view sites without ads... ads that will be more intrusive then ever before

i'm with redliam. the bugmenot resource is a great alternative for internet users who wish to access registration protected content.

Log ins are generally bad, yes. The only time it is truly acceptable is when it is for sensitive information such as your bank or tax information. Perpetual cookies, like Google's or Newsvine's, make it much easier but far too many sites ignore this. If I go to a website that requires log in, I hit that red X faster than light. It's far too much of a hastle. You need something very special to require log in.

At the end of the day it's all about what you get for logging in. Unlike the usual news sites who just want your personal info for marketing purposes. (have they not worked out that most people lie in them just to get through them quickly) Whereas Newsvine asks the least amount of you and gives you so much more than any other.

I too leave a site rather than register but I feel sites like this that i have a vested interest in are worth it. For Newsvine to work it needs an active core community who help police it. Ebay succeeded beacause Pierre Omidyar wanted the community to validate the quality of the site not just beacause it made practical sense but because the community must take responsibility for themselves. If this was totally open it wouldn't take many people that long to destroy it, ala wiki OpEd trial at the Los Angeles Times.

@Saeed: Wasn't that the purpose of MS Passport?

Solved

A centralized location to log in to any site over the internet? I smell high security risks.

there's also a bugmenot firefox plugin so you don't have to bother remembering the account password, etc.

Yes, there are all sorts of scripts and things to make it easy to login. But even with those, you'll question why you should give somebody your information. I don't sign up for the New York Times because I can get all my news elsewhere (such as here). It must be special for a log in.

Justin: you're absolutely right. the problem is the "centralized" nature of most "single sign-ons" for the web. For whatever reason, lots of folks don't trust Microsoft, so Passport is pretty much just an MS technology. There are a bunch of projects going on though which are de-centralized. Two of the most promising open source systems are mIDm by Stephen Downes of the Canadian National Research Council and OpenID by Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal. Both of these systems are simple and straightforward, and the two teams are working together to make them interoperable. If you're a techie and interested, both teams are looking for help.

To realize the power of Newsvine, it seems to me you need that login. To comment, to seed, to post articles -- to be of any value, they need to be tied to you. And if you want any of that ad revenue, you definitely need traffic tied to your account.

If you want to sort it, tag it, vote on it and build your own feeds, it needs to know you.

If you just want to read, feel free to find your AP news anywhere.

For things like the New York Times website I find the request for a registration to be ridiculous. I'm not required to register when I buy their newpaper on the street, so why should I do it on their website? But, if there is anything important, private, or sensitive behind the checkpoint I don't think a "unified login id" is any better. That is an unecessary securty risk. It makes me think of the words, "identity theft."

I'm not required to register when I buy their newpaper on the street, so why should I do it on their website?

I think this logic is faulty. You're also not required to pay money for the news on their website. I'm sure you would find the suggestion of paying a couple bucks (or whatever the daily Times runs) every day equally ridiculous.

I'm in agreement that logins can be annoying, but companies use the information provided to help their business. Maybe - hopefully - it is not directly making money for them (no spam emails, no selling info to third parties), but it probably indirectly helps them make enough money to continue to provide content to you for free of charge.

In the end, if it isn't important enough for you to not log in, then you can probably live without it. If Best-Of Craigslist required me to create a different login every day, I would gladly do it. Until Google owns everything and all site logins hook into your Gmail account, I think the smart (and safe) money is to get a secondary email account and use Firefox to remember your non-important passwords.

Why do most people here talk about logins as if it's only used for marketing? A lot of times logins are used to uniquely identify you for your benefit. It allows you to set preferences and make the experience on that site personalized. There are plenty of sites which do not use the login info for marketing purposes (kinda useless anyway since most people lie). A good example would be Newsvine (see a comment about that above).

A centralized system would be too insecure in my opinion. I would never register for that. Once your password has been guessed/hacked, the hacker has access to everything. I wouldn't feel very comfortable with that. A better solution would be to use a tool like RoboForm, which stores your login info and such locally and encrypted. Much safer, independent and you won't have to remember more than one password anymore..

The whole thing about registering though, is purely so companies or websites have your details on file

And the answer for that is to give all phony information including a hotmail or gmail account set up for just that purpose..

And the answer for that is to give all phony information including a hotmail or gmail account set up for just that purpose..

Until you reach the next problem, those sites that don't allow you to register with hotmail or gmail accounts. Then you need to go dig for some unknown free mail service that they don't know off ...