A couple of days ago, Daring Fireball pointed me to a great new web site, Instapaper. Basically, it’s a trivial way to collect your own little list of links that you want to read later. It’s an awesome way to transport URLs between multiple computers, your iPhone, and all the other web-enabled devices you might be using.
I used to use del.icio.us and tagged all those links as ‘inbox’, but Instapaper tremenduously simplifies the task. (And makes it doable at all on devices with limited screen space). Basically, all you do is hit the ‘Read Later’ bookmarklet when you come across a site you like.
But despite all my love for it - and I truly adore it -, there’s one part I don’t get. The ID management is crude, to say it politely. It allows you to establish accounts with no passwords, and anybody who knows your account name will be able to set a password later, denying you access. And if you have set a password, you will not be able to recover it, should you forget it. Instapaper is not alone with this - even a fairly prominent site like seesmic only implemented that feature recently. (Not to mention the fact that it’s yet another password to remember)
This implies to me two things. One, identity management seems to be an afterthought for many web sites, and two, there seems to be no simple, reusable package for this. In the long run, this will lead to a lot of pain with our identities on the web.
I do understand developing a new site is hard work, and identity is not sexy - but if you can’t bring yourself to put sufficient effort into this unglamorous but very necessary task, at least piggy-back on an open mechanism like OpenID. Your app will benefit, and so will your users.