7 ms·

Subscriptions are the New Black

68 points by terrellm 17y ago

anovaskulk 17y ago
Making your site a frequently used one is not solving the password problem; it's sidestepping it.
- yungchin 17y ago
  I guess he forgot to add this corollary: If you can't make your product a frequent-use product, use somebody else's sign-on system (Google, Facebook Connect...).
  - davemc500hats 17y ago
    yes, that was the conclusion I was not-very-subtly suggesting.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
wmeredith 17y ago
I couldn't even get through that due to formatting issues. Good lord I've never seen a site more in need a little web typography restraint. I'll just leave this here: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
- timb 17y ago
  I think Dave's unique formatting is an essential part of the experience of reading his posts. Filtering it through the Readability tool is similar to listening to MIDI file versions of your favourite songs.
  - ojbyrne 17y ago
    Or you could just not bother. I just skipped to the summary: "This has been a complete ramble and i don't have time to edit this shit, so i'm leaving it as it is."
jacquesm 17y ago
Subscriptions have been 'the new black' and a mainstay of my income since 2000 or so, but subscriptions do not lend themselves to all kinds of content. Advertising has always been a way to make otherwise losing propositions profitable, and as long as there are companies marketing products there will be advertising. It would be wasteful not to tap in to those dollars. As Patio11 elsewhere already pointed out adsense is a form of micropayments, and micropayments are the 'pay-as-you-go' of subscriptions. The only problem with that is that adsense is not transparent and it doesn't allow you to set your own price. In fact, you don't even know how much your inventory is really worth. So if your site does not have a very tight coupling between the users and the sites, one that you expect to last for many months or years advertising is actually a very good solution, but adsense in particular may not be the best you can do. Another problem with adsense is the fact that clickfraud benefits both google and the fraudsters, so for advertisers it is very difficult to track whether they're spending their money correctly or not. I wished someone would start to give google some serious competition in this space.
- patio11 17y ago
  Advertising has always been a way to make otherwise losing propositions profitable Or you could, you know, be the guy paying for the AdWords. I sell a product to consumers over the Internet. Stop the presses, I know. I have many competitors who do free versions essentially the same product, monetized by ads. My ads, since if Google polled the entire world saying "Hey who of you would pay cash money to speak to an elementary school English teacher currently making Reading Rainbow bingo cards?" I'd be up in the front row shouting "OOH OOH PICK ME!" Since I know what Google charges me and I can estimate what Google keeps, I can ballpark estimate the CPMs for their sites. Its in the $2 a month range. The effective CPM for my site is more than twenty times higher than that. Ads also have a pernicious effect on your product design. A core skill for B2C products is optimizing them so that the user gets through the workflow successfully. We optimize for success, because successful users pay us money. If you have CPC ads on your site, you have to optimize for failure: the ad has to be more enticing than your application/content or you don't get paid. Granted, there are some audiences who don't pay money for anything (why hello, students) and some applications whose users will not pay money for them (why hello, URL shorteners/social networkers/anything starting with the letters Tw), but you don't have to make these. There is literally infinite need for solutions to problems, even in B2C (C stands for consumer, i.e., one who buys products), that you could deliver profitably. And then spend a portion of those profits tossing nickels to sites without business sense so you can steal their users and charge them dollars.
maxklein 17y ago
People don't want to subscribe to stuff. They only do it when there is no other choice. If your site only offers subscriptions, I'll make a site with a one-time payment thing, store the users payment information and sell them new 'innovations' and 'features' that will be as easy as clicking a button to get, and that will bring me more money that your subscriptions. If I have someone using my site all the time, it's easy to sell him something new.
- terrellm 17y ago
  I agree that people prefer a sense of ownership rather than renting, even if renting is in their best interest. However, the problem with a one-time payment is that the vendor loses incentive to continue supporting the buyer after the transaction. The primary way to generate additional revenues from that customer is, as you say "sell new innovations and features". This adding of new features can increase complexity which eventually impacts the ease of use and increases the learning curve. These two side effects can have a negative impact on new user signups. I'm optimistic of the web app user model after having developed desktop software for the past 10 years. Each version has to "work just like the previous, but better". You can only do that for so many versions :)
  - gte910h 17y ago
    I honestly prefer fee-per-month software. It is MUCH cheaper than the equivalent valued software would be for the first 4-5 months, and most software is used infrequently, so I usually save money with the starting and stopping of subscriptions.
    - jhancock 17y ago
      I like SaaS subscriptions as well. Most that hold my data as opposed to just providing a cool tool do not allow you to turn off your subscription for a few months without losing your data.
- Slashed 17y ago
  What about 'pay for what you use' model? Isn't this somewhere in between of subscription and one-time payment? Users still get the sense of 'ownership' and based on a product, businesses can get payments almost as if it was a subscription service. Though I absolutely understand that this model can't fit all, but I find it to be a good option to consider.
callmeed 17y ago
It sure took the author a long time to get to his main points–I almost gave up. Maybe reading Williams Zinsser should be the new black ...
- davemc500hats 17y ago
  sorry, i'm sure with less insanity and a better editor i could have gotten there much quicker... but between sleepless redeye blogging and my usual retardedness, "i didn't have time to write a short letter" my apologies, and thanks for hanging in there if you got to the end. my condolences if you didn't
  - callmeed 17y ago
    No problem—and BTW I wouldn't have said anything if I didn't think your main points were worth reading (they were).
Mc_Big_G 17y ago
I'm curious if the password problem is really as big as he says or if he's just biased because of his experience at PayPal. I don't always remember my password, but I've never encountered a site that didn't offer one of the following: 1) Password retrieval/reset by email 2) Password retrieval/reset by secret questions Also, don't most browsers these days ask you if you want it to save your password? Then there is password plugins. I thought most people use the same or an easy password anyway.
- gte910h 17y ago
  Yes, I'm with you. "The password problem" is a non-starter for me.
  - chrischen 17y ago
    for me, remembering what username or email I used is the problem. It's further compounded by the fact that password retrieval sends it to the email I don't know I used, and that they usually don't have an obvious username retrieval method.
- davemc500hats 17y ago
  so 2 items to explain this further: 1) financial sites have more secure / higher-friction password recovery techniques than non-financial sites 2) more inside-baseball point that i didn't get into -- PayPal security questions weren't in the acct signup flow, they were in the after-txn flow of email confirmation. HOWEVER, since many people either a) intentionally or accidentally didn't provide the right email, or b) even if they entered the right email, they didn't go thru email confirm, then result: MANY MANY people -- i estimated at least 10%, possibly up to 25-50% -- never entered their security reminder Q's. this subsequently resulted in limited ability to recover password info without having to FAX IN driver's license or other paper info, which most users screamed about. in short: it's a long story, but password recovery for financial sites is much harder than non-financial sites, and for PayPal is even harder still than other normal financial sites due to the way we had implemented mandatory acct creation workflow and security reminder Q'n workflow. needless to say, this was a fucked-up situation that resulted in a lot of customer service hassle... which i got to experience first-hand on many occasions. (sorry for the long-winder explanation, but you asked, so... but it's not your fault. even many people who worked there didn't understand this very well. it used to frustrate the hell out of me)
PJNasty 17y ago
This jumped out at me: "Unless MSFT develops Xbox into a widespread payment system..." After a couple years of being down on MSFT, I've gotta say that xbox360 is a pretty brilliant product. Xbox live Gold can be purchased as a 5.99/month subscription, or 45/year one time payment. (like itunes cards, you'll find these in places like target and walmart).
jhancock 17y ago
McClure gets close to a good point but fails to convert. Here's his solution to password friction: "Make a brain-dead simple, frequent-use product. If users login a lot, then they don't forget their password." He then lists the following examples that solve this better than PayPal: Social Networks, Email, IM, Games, Music, Entertainment. I can't recall the last time I needed to use my password to login to Facebook, Skype, gmail, etc. The cookies are set to let me in. If I were a low-tech user, the password friction problem still exists as it always has. Amazon has me logged in; I can add books to my wish list without retyping my password. But to make a purchase, I have to type my password. The password friction problem does not go away.
- jessep 17y ago
  I think he's implying that your site won't have a password. You'll instead use one of these services for both auth and payment.
  - jhancock 17y ago
    I understand what he's implying. His case is thin. PayPal is huge and can easily afford the customer service required by noobs forgetting their password. Can you think of another way to operate such a business? His solution implies that google, yahoo, facebook should be the next PayPal in this regard. OK, so now those organizations have to handle this type of support.
    - davemc500hats 17y ago
      >>PayPal is huge and can easily afford the customer service required by noobs forgetting their password nope, wrong again. ARPUs for PayPal users are probably only around $5-25 per year (excluding the minority of fanatic eBay regulars), and you can easily eat up all of that cost or more in telephone customer support.
      - jhancock 17y ago
        Really? Are you saying PayPal is not profitable and the lack of profitability is due to the costs of phone support for noobs forgetting their password? Don't throw ARPUs at me. Either they are profitable or they are not. I can certainly understand the argument that users of other sign-on systems "may" remember their passwords better than PayPal, but what evidence do you have of this? What extra margin of increased password remembrance makes for a more profitable model?
davemc500hats 17y ago
just to clarify: the post was trying to highlight both subscriptions AND transactions, not vs. each other... they aren't mutually exclusive. in fact, most likely a common model would be: 1) free for most users 2) low-cost txn for first paid use 3) convert initial txn users into frequent use / regular subscription later, but continue txnl model as well. perhaps in mid-rant I failed to explain this clearly; possibly due to lack of sleep, or the cocaine-heroin speedball I shot up before getting on the redeye to NYC. then again, maybe you guys just need to read that little part where I say "AND" between subscriptions & transactions, not just draw your conclusion from the headline... but I digress.
- jhancock 17y ago
  If your point was that businesses need to start charging for their services/content, ok fine, no argument there. But much of your rant is in finding a solution for password friction by pointing out what a major cost it is to PayPal. You make no case as to how google/yahoo/facebook will solve password friction better than PayPal other than to say that users log into these sites more frequently and therefore remember those passwords better than they do a PayPal password. While users "use" these sites more frequently, they do not type their passwords much. This does not solve the password friction problem since transactions (with the exception of some types of micro-transactions) will still need a password at the point of committing to the transaction.
  - davemc500hats 17y ago
    a) people certainly use social networks (Facebook) and email and game / entertainment sites more than they use E-Commerce sites -- one is daily (or hourly!), the other is weekly or monthly b) even if they don't type their passwords in "much", they certainly do so relatively much more frequently. whether or not my post was a rant, this is a fairly simple point based on simple frequency of use.
supermetroid 17y ago
I personally enjoyed the articles bombastic formatting and snarky tone, but I'm not sure the author says much of anything. The fact is, Dave's second assertion (that e-commerce/subscriptions is the new default startup business model) isn't based on more than speculation. He makes this second assertion with great conviction ("Get Dem Bitches to PAY You, G.") and I almost want to believe him--until I remember that most of both the media and content industries are still fumbling with whether or not selling subscriptions /digital content is a worthwhile business endeavor. Also, the idea that a service's success hinges on a user's ability to remember a password is preposterous. Seems as if it could be somewhat of an obstacle when a service is first launched (Dave's early Paypal), but come on. Passwords have become commonplace, and for the most part--especially when money's involved--people don't seem to forget them. They may have when e-commerce was in its absolute infancy, but with the rise of ebay, Paypal, online banking services the password has garnered undeniable legitimacy among the majority of people. I have no data to back this up, but this isn't too outrageous a claim. Right? Maybe I'm looking at this from the wrong angle.
- davemc500hats 17y ago
  >> Paypal, online banking services the password has garnered undeniable legitimacy among the majority of people. >>I have no data to back this up, but this isn't too outrageous a claim. Right? nope, sorry you're wrong & yes you have no data to back this up. even with "100's of millions of account", it's likely PayPal has never been used by a large % of internet users -- perhaps even a majority -- and it's certainly not used frequently (ie, >1x / month) by more than tens of millions of users. even without me being there for 5 years i'm pretty sure any recent eBay quarterly stmt will back me up on that (note: accts != users != frequent users). trust me: "the forgotten password problem" is STILL a huge issue for PayPal today, as it is with almost every large site... even one as frequent as PayPal (or Amazon). if you think i'm mistaken, i suggest you talk to any major tech blog site that has switched to using Facebook Connect or Twitter oAuth for comment authentication, and the subsequent increase in comment activity. it's not too much of an extrapolation to draw a similar conclusion around 3rd-party auth integrated with payments (which is what PayPal has been doing for 10 years).
vdm 17y ago
I would have preferred if he just worked on his presentation.
Tim_M 17y ago
> In 2015 the default login & payment method(s) on the web will be facebook Connect, Google Gmail, or Apple iTunes. Why not openid?
- cheriot 17y ago
  Regular users would need to: a) care about managing their online identity b) remember a valid URI What do you think the odds are?

68 points by terrellm 17y ago

anovaskulk 17y ago

Making your site a frequently used one is not solving the password problem; it's sidestepping it.

yungchin 17y ago
I guess he forgot to add this corollary: If you can't make your product a frequent-use product, use somebody else's sign-on system (Google, Facebook Connect...).
- davemc500hats 17y ago
  yes, that was the conclusion I was not-very-subtly suggesting.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

wmeredith 17y ago

I couldn't even get through that due to formatting issues. Good lord I've never seen a site more in need a little web typography restraint. I'll just leave this here: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

timb 17y ago
I think Dave's unique formatting is an essential part of the experience of reading his posts. Filtering it through the Readability tool is similar to listening to MIDI file versions of your favourite songs.
- ojbyrne 17y ago
  Or you could just not bother. I just skipped to the summary: "This has been a complete ramble and i don't have time to edit this shit, so i'm leaving it as it is."

jacquesm 17y ago

Subscriptions have been 'the new black' and a mainstay of my income since 2000 or so, but subscriptions do not lend themselves to all kinds of content. Advertising has always been a way to make otherwise losing propositions profitable, and as long as there are companies marketing products there will be advertising. It would be wasteful not to tap in to those dollars. As Patio11 elsewhere already pointed out adsense is a form of micropayments, and micropayments are the 'pay-as-you-go' of subscriptions. The only problem with that is that adsense is not transparent and it doesn't allow you to set your own price. In fact, you don't even know how much your inventory is really worth. So if your site does not have a very tight coupling between the users and the sites, one that you expect to last for many months or years advertising is actually a very good solution, but adsense in particular may not be the best you can do. Another problem with adsense is the fact that clickfraud benefits both google and the fraudsters, so for advertisers it is very difficult to track whether they're spending their money correctly or not. I wished someone would start to give google some serious competition in this space.

patio11 17y ago
Advertising has always been a way to make otherwise losing propositions profitable Or you could, you know, be the guy paying for the AdWords. I sell a product to consumers over the Internet. Stop the presses, I know. I have many competitors who do free versions essentially the same product, monetized by ads. My ads, since if Google polled the entire world saying "Hey who of you would pay cash money to speak to an elementary school English teacher currently making Reading Rainbow bingo cards?" I'd be up in the front row shouting "OOH OOH PICK ME!" Since I know what Google charges me and I can estimate what Google keeps, I can ballpark estimate the CPMs for their sites. Its in the $2 a month range. The effective CPM for my site is more than twenty times higher than that. Ads also have a pernicious effect on your product design. A core skill for B2C products is optimizing them so that the user gets through the workflow successfully. We optimize for success, because successful users pay us money. If you have CPC ads on your site, you have to optimize for failure: the ad has to be more enticing than your application/content or you don't get paid. Granted, there are some audiences who don't pay money for anything (why hello, students) and some applications whose users will not pay money for them (why hello, URL shorteners/social networkers/anything starting with the letters Tw), but you don't have to make these. There is literally infinite need for solutions to problems, even in B2C (C stands for consumer, i.e., one who buys products), that you could deliver profitably. And then spend a portion of those profits tossing nickels to sites without business sense so you can steal their users and charge them dollars.

maxklein 17y ago

People don't want to subscribe to stuff. They only do it when there is no other choice. If your site only offers subscriptions, I'll make a site with a one-time payment thing, store the users payment information and sell them new 'innovations' and 'features' that will be as easy as clicking a button to get, and that will bring me more money that your subscriptions. If I have someone using my site all the time, it's easy to sell him something new.

terrellm 17y ago
I agree that people prefer a sense of ownership rather than renting, even if renting is in their best interest. However, the problem with a one-time payment is that the vendor loses incentive to continue supporting the buyer after the transaction. The primary way to generate additional revenues from that customer is, as you say "sell new innovations and features". This adding of new features can increase complexity which eventually impacts the ease of use and increases the learning curve. These two side effects can have a negative impact on new user signups. I'm optimistic of the web app user model after having developed desktop software for the past 10 years. Each version has to "work just like the previous, but better". You can only do that for so many versions :)
- gte910h 17y ago
  I honestly prefer fee-per-month software. It is MUCH cheaper than the equivalent valued software would be for the first 4-5 months, and most software is used infrequently, so I usually save money with the starting and stopping of subscriptions.
  - jhancock 17y ago
    I like SaaS subscriptions as well. Most that hold my data as opposed to just providing a cool tool do not allow you to turn off your subscription for a few months without losing your data.
Slashed 17y ago
What about 'pay for what you use' model? Isn't this somewhere in between of subscription and one-time payment? Users still get the sense of 'ownership' and based on a product, businesses can get payments almost as if it was a subscription service. Though I absolutely understand that this model can't fit all, but I find it to be a good option to consider.

callmeed 17y ago

It sure took the author a long time to get to his main points–I almost gave up. Maybe reading Williams Zinsser should be the new black ...

davemc500hats 17y ago
sorry, i'm sure with less insanity and a better editor i could have gotten there much quicker... but between sleepless redeye blogging and my usual retardedness, "i didn't have time to write a short letter" my apologies, and thanks for hanging in there if you got to the end. my condolences if you didn't
- callmeed 17y ago
  No problem—and BTW I wouldn't have said anything if I didn't think your main points were worth reading (they were).

Mc_Big_G 17y ago

I'm curious if the password problem is really as big as he says or if he's just biased because of his experience at PayPal. I don't always remember my password, but I've never encountered a site that didn't offer one of the following: 1) Password retrieval/reset by email 2) Password retrieval/reset by secret questions Also, don't most browsers these days ask you if you want it to save your password? Then there is password plugins. I thought most people use the same or an easy password anyway.

gte910h 17y ago
Yes, I'm with you. "The password problem" is a non-starter for me.
- chrischen 17y ago
  for me, remembering what username or email I used is the problem. It's further compounded by the fact that password retrieval sends it to the email I don't know I used, and that they usually don't have an obvious username retrieval method.
davemc500hats 17y ago
so 2 items to explain this further: 1) financial sites have more secure / higher-friction password recovery techniques than non-financial sites 2) more inside-baseball point that i didn't get into -- PayPal security questions weren't in the acct signup flow, they were in the after-txn flow of email confirmation. HOWEVER, since many people either a) intentionally or accidentally didn't provide the right email, or b) even if they entered the right email, they didn't go thru email confirm, then result: MANY MANY people -- i estimated at least 10%, possibly up to 25-50% -- never entered their security reminder Q's. this subsequently resulted in limited ability to recover password info without having to FAX IN driver's license or other paper info, which most users screamed about. in short: it's a long story, but password recovery for financial sites is much harder than non-financial sites, and for PayPal is even harder still than other normal financial sites due to the way we had implemented mandatory acct creation workflow and security reminder Q'n workflow. needless to say, this was a fucked-up situation that resulted in a lot of customer service hassle... which i got to experience first-hand on many occasions. (sorry for the long-winder explanation, but you asked, so... but it's not your fault. even many people who worked there didn't understand this very well. it used to frustrate the hell out of me)

PJNasty 17y ago

This jumped out at me: "Unless MSFT develops Xbox into a widespread payment system..." After a couple years of being down on MSFT, I've gotta say that xbox360 is a pretty brilliant product. Xbox live Gold can be purchased as a 5.99/month subscription, or 45/year one time payment. (like itunes cards, you'll find these in places like target and walmart).

jhancock 17y ago

McClure gets close to a good point but fails to convert. Here's his solution to password friction: "Make a brain-dead simple, frequent-use product. If users login a lot, then they don't forget their password." He then lists the following examples that solve this better than PayPal: Social Networks, Email, IM, Games, Music, Entertainment. I can't recall the last time I needed to use my password to login to Facebook, Skype, gmail, etc. The cookies are set to let me in. If I were a low-tech user, the password friction problem still exists as it always has. Amazon has me logged in; I can add books to my wish list without retyping my password. But to make a purchase, I have to type my password. The password friction problem does not go away.

jessep 17y ago
I think he's implying that your site won't have a password. You'll instead use one of these services for both auth and payment.
- jhancock 17y ago
  I understand what he's implying. His case is thin. PayPal is huge and can easily afford the customer service required by noobs forgetting their password. Can you think of another way to operate such a business? His solution implies that google, yahoo, facebook should be the next PayPal in this regard. OK, so now those organizations have to handle this type of support.
  - davemc500hats 17y ago
    >>PayPal is huge and can easily afford the customer service required by noobs forgetting their password nope, wrong again. ARPUs for PayPal users are probably only around $5-25 per year (excluding the minority of fanatic eBay regulars), and you can easily eat up all of that cost or more in telephone customer support.
    - jhancock 17y ago
      Really? Are you saying PayPal is not profitable and the lack of profitability is due to the costs of phone support for noobs forgetting their password? Don't throw ARPUs at me. Either they are profitable or they are not. I can certainly understand the argument that users of other sign-on systems "may" remember their passwords better than PayPal, but what evidence do you have of this? What extra margin of increased password remembrance makes for a more profitable model?

davemc500hats 17y ago

just to clarify: the post was trying to highlight both subscriptions AND transactions, not vs. each other... they aren't mutually exclusive. in fact, most likely a common model would be: 1) free for most users 2) low-cost txn for first paid use 3) convert initial txn users into frequent use / regular subscription later, but continue txnl model as well. perhaps in mid-rant I failed to explain this clearly; possibly due to lack of sleep, or the cocaine-heroin speedball I shot up before getting on the redeye to NYC. then again, maybe you guys just need to read that little part where I say "AND" between subscriptions & transactions, not just draw your conclusion from the headline... but I digress.

jhancock 17y ago
If your point was that businesses need to start charging for their services/content, ok fine, no argument there. But much of your rant is in finding a solution for password friction by pointing out what a major cost it is to PayPal. You make no case as to how google/yahoo/facebook will solve password friction better than PayPal other than to say that users log into these sites more frequently and therefore remember those passwords better than they do a PayPal password. While users "use" these sites more frequently, they do not type their passwords much. This does not solve the password friction problem since transactions (with the exception of some types of micro-transactions) will still need a password at the point of committing to the transaction.
- davemc500hats 17y ago
  a) people certainly use social networks (Facebook) and email and game / entertainment sites more than they use E-Commerce sites -- one is daily (or hourly!), the other is weekly or monthly b) even if they don't type their passwords in "much", they certainly do so relatively much more frequently. whether or not my post was a rant, this is a fairly simple point based on simple frequency of use.

supermetroid 17y ago

I personally enjoyed the articles bombastic formatting and snarky tone, but I'm not sure the author says much of anything. The fact is, Dave's second assertion (that e-commerce/subscriptions is the new default startup business model) isn't based on more than speculation. He makes this second assertion with great conviction ("Get Dem Bitches to PAY You, G.") and I almost want to believe him--until I remember that most of both the media and content industries are still fumbling with whether or not selling subscriptions /digital content is a worthwhile business endeavor. Also, the idea that a service's success hinges on a user's ability to remember a password is preposterous. Seems as if it could be somewhat of an obstacle when a service is first launched (Dave's early Paypal), but come on. Passwords have become commonplace, and for the most part--especially when money's involved--people don't seem to forget them. They may have when e-commerce was in its absolute infancy, but with the rise of ebay, Paypal, online banking services the password has garnered undeniable legitimacy among the majority of people. I have no data to back this up, but this isn't too outrageous a claim. Right? Maybe I'm looking at this from the wrong angle.

davemc500hats 17y ago
>> Paypal, online banking services the password has garnered undeniable legitimacy among the majority of people. >>I have no data to back this up, but this isn't too outrageous a claim. Right? nope, sorry you're wrong & yes you have no data to back this up. even with "100's of millions of account", it's likely PayPal has never been used by a large % of internet users -- perhaps even a majority -- and it's certainly not used frequently (ie, >1x / month) by more than tens of millions of users. even without me being there for 5 years i'm pretty sure any recent eBay quarterly stmt will back me up on that (note: accts != users != frequent users). trust me: "the forgotten password problem" is STILL a huge issue for PayPal today, as it is with almost every large site... even one as frequent as PayPal (or Amazon). if you think i'm mistaken, i suggest you talk to any major tech blog site that has switched to using Facebook Connect or Twitter oAuth for comment authentication, and the subsequent increase in comment activity. it's not too much of an extrapolation to draw a similar conclusion around 3rd-party auth integrated with payments (which is what PayPal has been doing for 10 years).

vdm 17y ago

I would have preferred if he just worked on his presentation.

Tim_M 17y ago

> In 2015 the default login & payment method(s) on the web will be facebook Connect, Google Gmail, or Apple iTunes. Why not openid?

cheriot 17y ago
Regular users would need to: a) care about managing their online identity b) remember a valid URI What do you think the odds are?