New Sign In Page: A Smart Move by Ma.gnolia

Last night it was mentioned on the Vidoop blog that social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia has launched a new sign in page. I still wait for the Ma.gnolia newsletter to read it straight from the horse’s mouth, though.

Anyway, what’s so interesting about a new sign in page, you may ask? Well, simply Ma.gnolia requires that users have a verified identity with another service already. It won’t be possible for new members to use a username and password combination to join Ma.gnolia anymore. The sign in page looks like this:

The screenshot can be interpreted that the verified identity can only be an OpenID. Though that’s wrong. From the dropdown menu users can choose from these services:

Of course, the majority also works as an OpenID provider, though a Facebook ID is also possible.

Spam

So what’s the reason for Ma.gnolia to change the sign in method? According to a blog post from Larry Halff from January already, it’s spam. Larry explained that almost 80% of all new accounts created were ones by spammers. Actually I didn’t expect such a high number. Spam still seems to be a very profitable business. Some spammers create accounts manually but most of them are created by bots. As you can see from the comments of that blog post, Ma.gnolia is not the only service affected by spam, Simpy suffers as well.

Will the new sign in process prevent spammers from joining? Probably not. Spammers can sign up for Facebook and they can also get an OpenID from different providers. But it makes their shady business harder and hopefully less profitable.

Outsourcing Identity Verification

Other companies like Buxfer also allow users to sign in with identities from other services (see screenshot below). It seems to become a trend and it’s actually a rather smart move by companies because in most cases they will get more accurate information about new users while they don’t have to deal with account verification.

Users profit as well as they don’t have to provide passwords to another company. Also they don’t have to build the same amount of trust to those companies. They can stay with a provider who they trust.

Buxfer’s sign in options: