ATTN: Social Media Application Developers
Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. My blog. My company.
Aside from those, I have a Google account. I have a gravatar account. I have a WordPress account. I have a Yahoo! account. I’m on Flickr. Delicious. Technorati. Ning.
Before that there was MySpace. And AOL. Back in the day, I even had a Prodigy account.
So here’s my question, since I’m absolutely everywhere online, when you develop your software why in the world are you asking me to fill in the same questions, upload the same pictures, and submit new logins and passwords? Why would you do this to yourself? Why would you make this so painful in your application?
I have published my personal data all over the Internet. Go use it. Make it easy for me. Ask me to login using Oauth and grab all the information from one of my networks and use it for your new one.
Don’t make me find a new login or see if it’s available. Don’t frustrate me with submitting a password (twice) that I’m never going to remember… that doesn’t match any other password because your rules are different. Don’t make me verify my email address – I did that already for my other services.
Heck, use the OpenSocial API for goodness sakes! You could then get me and all my friends.
I’m happy with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I don’t need you. I don’t need your application. The last thing you should be doing is asking me all the same questions that I’ve been answering for the last decade. You want to impress me? Go out and gather and scrape all the information you can find about me and just have me verify it.
Quit being so lazy. I’m the one that you should expect to be lazy. Do the hard work for me. Then I’ll try out your application. Until then, leave me alone.
Thanks.