User registration, log in and openid
Posted 27 September 2009 by Paul
We are huge supporters of the OpenID open access method, so it made sense for us to include it in the GetMeCooking website.
If you do not know what OpenID is, it is basically a method of allowing a user to register and log onto multiple websites using a single account. This is known as ‘Single Sign On’ (SSO).
User Benefits
- Faster and easier registration and login
- Reduced frustration from forgotten user name and/or password
- Maintain personal data at preferred sites
- Minimise password security risks
Website Benefits
- Increased conversion rates from site ‘visitors’ to ‘registered users’
- Reduced customer care cost and frustration with forgotten passwords
- Accelerated adoption of ‘community’ features
- Limited password sharing issues
- Facilitated single sign-on across multiple company and partner websites
The chances are that you have already used OpenID in order to register and log onto websites.
Some popular OpenID providers (sites where your user account can also be an OpenID account) are Facebook, Google, Yahoo, AOL, Windows Live and myOpenID.
If you have a Facebook account, you may have already used that to log onto other websites. In that scenario, you have used OpenID to register and log you onto that 3rd party website (the OpenID consumer) and some/all of your information from your Facebook profile may have (optionally) been passed to the 3rd party website.
At GetMeCooking we are now an OpenID consumer. Being an OpenID provider will not give us or our users any benefits at the moment, so at present we do not have any plans to become one.
If you do not currently have an OpenID account and would like one, we suggest myOpenID as it is free, only takes a minute to join and is very flexible. For example with myOpenID you can create several different user profiles that can be used in different site types, such as cooking, sports, education while still using the same logon information.
In your GetMeCooking user profile, you can easily associate one or multiple OpenID accounts with your current GetMeCooking account. So you can actually have several valid OpenID logons for a single GetMeCooking account.
For more details on OpenID see http://www.janrain.com/openid
To see this in action, simply register a new account or login to GetMeCooking!
