Category: Web/Tech

There’s a huge elephant in the room – that no one wants to admit is there.

Over the last year, a number of different services have emerged that ask users to share with them their username/password information for other services to support some sort of integration.

The core example of this is updating status messages across services. For example, today you can use FriendFeed to automatically have your FriendFeed posts shared with your Twitter account – but to do so, you have to share your Twitter account username/password with FriendFeed.

Another example is Ping.fm – which attempts to act as sort of a master hub for status information updates. Again, to use Ping.fm, you have to share with Ping.fm the username/password information for all of the other services you want it to update.

Unfortunately, these services are gradually educating consumers that it’s OK to share their username/password details with “intermediaries” – other service providers who are offering ancillary services. Doing so for status information doesn’t represent any significant financial risk – although, if a compromise were to occur, reputational damage certainly might result.

Clearly, we need an alternative approach – one that doesn’t require users to cough up their username/password credentials to another, somewhat unrelated service – which could represent a security exposure for those credentials.

Technologies exist to enable this capability without sharing credentials – but they’re more cumbersome for users and for the services that are trying to provide the intermediary services.

At the moment, we’re sliding down a slippery slope. Before something bad happens, there needs to be a serious focus on getting this right – shedding the current approach of sharing credentials with intermediaries and, rather, enabling new web services to perform as authorized proxies on behalf of authenticated users.

A friend tells me that Microsoft, apparently reacting to criticism about all of the different versions it made available with Windows Vista, has streamlined the number of versions for the upcoming Windows 7 release – to five or six versions – depending how you count. Mary Jo Foley has more on this important story!

Can you believe it?

I’ve been playing quite a bit recently with FriendFeed – and find that FriendFeed’s Rooms feature is very interesting and useful. With Rooms, you can create a place where you can share things of common interest among Room members – including being able to comment on them, etc. Rooms on Friendfeed can be either public or private – and they have their own RSS feeds.

I’ve setup a public room on FriendFeed called Scott’s Kitchen Recipes as a trial. I’ll be posting interesting recipes there that I find across the web. If you’re interested, join the room and then add you own links and comments! Or follow the activity in the room’s RSS feed.