6 ms·

Email address is the backbone of web identity. Nearly every registration system uses it. If you're having trouble with it, maybe, just maybe, it's on your end?

• mrweasel 14y ago
  If you honestly believe that, I would claim that you either have no customers or that your customer reside in a very limited sub-section of people. People do not believe that their email and identity is in any way linked. You and I might believe that, but don't count on your customers sharing your beliefs.
  • opminion 14y ago
    People do not believe that their email and identity is in any way linked I think that you might have to explain that a bit. I think that others try to argue that people use email at least as temporary identity, in the sense that at time t, they identify themselves with at least one of their email addresses. In practice this is enough for many web sites to use the email address as login. Perhaps you are talking about some longer sort of permanence, or uniqueness?
  • pjscott 14y ago
    Say what? My email addresses are linked to my identity because they are my email addresses. Most of them even have my name on them. Sure, I have several of them, and one of them disappeared when I graduated from college, so the mapping isn't perfect -- but they are nevertheless mine. The main exceptions to this are: 1. People who share an email address for convenience, like my grandparents. 2. Group-facade email addresses, like support@whatever.com, which may be routed to several people. 3. Email addresses that don't belong to anyone, like "noreply@whatever.com", or "autogenerated-4b243efa37e5b013a1d90b694c3bcaa3@hell.com"
  • aneth4 14y ago
    I haven't found this to be true, and I've dealt with a lot of customers. Even Facebook uses email for login, as does google and just about every other website I use. It's an interesting and bold statement that needs some supporting eveidence and explanation.
    • Groxx 14y ago
      You'll note that both Facebook and Google provide ways to hook up multiple emails to the same account, and multiple recovery accounts. Why do this if nobody uses it?
      • aneth4 14y ago
        Ok - that means people associate multiple email addresses with their identity. That doesn't change anything.
        • saurik 14y ago
          (Damn, I had wanted to post this yesterday, but then I forgot to quite finish it and it ended up sitting in a tab, unsent.) Yes, it does: it means that you cannot count on it as a canonical form of identity for any long period of time, as people expect to be able to change it; in fact, many people go through "the great purge" every couple years, deleting their e-mail address and selecting a new one, in order to purposely reboot the people who have their address: to them, it is a way to purposely restart their identity. You thereby have to think of e-mail addresses as more akin to your home address. If you ask me to log in with my home address, yes, that works: it doesn't work for everyone, as not everyone in the world has a home address, but the same thing can be said for e-mail addresses. Sometimes people will share a home address, but surprise surprise: sometimes people share e-mail addresses as well. When I am asked to log in to that form with my home address, and it works, you now might claim I've accepted it as part of my identity. Well, I haven't: I'm going to change my home address at some point, and someone else is then going to start living here, which is exactly what happens to many people who use ISP or University -provided e-mail. Hell, it also happens to people with vanity e-mail addresses if they let their domain registration expire (as happened to one of my friends, who otherwise was using the same e-mail address for a very very long period of time). Yes: it works temporarily, but it isn't my identity, and eventually it will fail, and unless you are really really weird (like, you are the kind of technology person who would probably consider it digital suicide to allow their domain name to expire, and has had the same e-mail address now for well over a decade), it will fail sooner than later, and may even fail on purpose when users invalidate it.
  • sergiosgc 14y ago
    I'll use a call to authority. Amazon uses the email as identity. If it works for them, surely it can't be that bad a decision...
    • johntb86 14y ago
      Amazon uses the email and password as an identity. I'm not sure that's a decision anyone should try to replicate.
    • saurik 14y ago
      Nope, like all other large providers (Facebook, Google, etc.) Amazon allows users to use e-mail addresses to log in, but they are not canonical stores of identity. In fact, Amazon is the most humorous example you could have pulled, because Amazon actually allows multiple accounts with the same e-mail address, and uses the password to differentiate (which is pretty much what jointb86 said, but I doubt if you knew this is the case that his comment was clear). "Why Does Amazon.com Allow Multiple Accounts With the Same Email Address?" http://www.experimentgarden.com/2009/11/why-does-amazoncom-allows-multiple.html http://www.experimentgarden.com/2009/11/why-does-amazoncom-a... "Note: If you change the e-mail address on your account to an e-mail address that is already associated with another Amazon account, we will ask that you first verify your e-mail address." -- http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=468538 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...
• dmd 14y ago
  I have had the same email address for 18 years, but I'm a dying breed. Most people I know change email address pretty regularly - as in more than once a year.
  • smspence 14y ago
    Seriously, most people you know change their email address more than once per year? Honestly, MOST of the people you know do that? I highly doubt that.
    • dmd 14y ago
      I deal with a lot of high school students. To them, Facebook is identity. Email is throwaway.
      • th5 14y ago
        wow, this is so interesting.... i cant even fathom that. getting old i guess
      • furyofantares 14y ago
        Don't you log into Facebook with an email address?
        • vlad003 14y ago
          You don't have to. You can use a username.
          • aphexairlines 14y ago
            They still have username@facebook.com as a stable email address.
        • saurik 14y ago
          Sure, but the Facebook login is just "any e-mail address"; it doesn't really mean something for your account. You can add more e-mail addresses to your account, and all of them are allowed to be used to log in; the same, incidentally, is true of Google accounts.
• dragonwriter 14y ago
  > Email address is the backbone of web identity. Nearly every registration system uses it. "Everyone else is doing is doing it that way" isn't a reason to do it that way, especially for a product, like Persona, that is supposedly about fixing what is wrong in what everyone else is doing.
  • sergiosgc 14y ago
    Except that: 1. Email actually works quite well as an individual identifier. At any given time, an email account is probably linked to only one person. 2. No alternative exists, in real world use, that really looks better
    • dragonwriter 14y ago
      > Except that: 1. Email actually works quite well as an individual identifier. No, it doesn't. > At any given time, an email account is probably linked to only one person. Lots of people have shared email accounts. And even without that the "at any one time" is one reason why it doesn't work as an individual identifier, its not stable. (Since cell phones and number portability have become ubiquitous, phone numbers are probably better than email addresses at this, but share the same sorts of problems.) > 2. No alternative exists, in real world use, that really looks better Sure alternatives exist. While its often important to have a contact email address connected to an identity, there is no reason to have an externally-meaningful value that is inextricably tied to the online identity, particularly if that value doesn't have an intrinsic, unique, and stable link to a particular person. You're justifying choosing a bad natural key with the argument that its the least-bad natural key, when not only is the proposition that the proposed key is the least-bad natural key somewhat dubious, more importantly, the use case calls for a key, but there is no reason for it to be a natural key.
      • sergiosgc 14y ago
        «You're justifying choosing a bad natural key with the argument that its the least-bad natural key, when not only is the proposition that the proposed key is the least-bad natural key somewhat dubious, more importantly, the use case calls for a key, but there is no reason for it to be a natural key.» Of course it has to be a natural key! Are you expecting that users will learn your theoretically perfect surrogate key? Do you understand that you will be competing for space in people's brain? For what reason? Because shared email accounts break the many to one relationship on mail <-> person?
• path411 14y ago
  Isn't that his point? Email address is a backbone of web identity simply because we don't have anything better. Maybe we should finally get around to figuring out something better? It's a hard problem because anything real world like a identifying number is flawed for anonymity. There needs to be a unique identifier for a web entity. It's always annoyed me that solutions like persona etc are approaching this by simply replacing email, when shouldn't they be abstracting my online identity? I hold several "personas" throughout various sites, email addresses, and applications. However, I don't want a product that simply merges them, I want a product that is more of a "meta-persona", that lets me easily track, manage, and expand them.
  • tempestn 14y ago
    Sounds like it already does kind of do that. From StavrosK above: "It maps multiple emails to the same identity, in that you use the same password to log in with all of them. The end site gets the email you log in to the site with (I can log in to Persona with email A but let all sites know email B every time." So based on that, if you want to expose three different identities to 3 different sites, you can set up Persona to do that automatically, without having to remember the separate emails and passwords you used for each one. I guess the only problem would be if you needed multiple separate logins to the same site, but unless it's your own site, presumably that should be rare.