I spend rather a lot of time reading and commenting upon blogs. I’m also part of various different community website’s. One thing that has struck me is the huge difference in registration complexity between sites.
Take this morning for instance – Garett Rogers had an interesting little post over on ZDNet about a new Gmail iGoogle gadget. As a user of Gmail for hosted domains, I can’t enjoy the full breadth of functionality of iGoogle (I can’t for example use reader with my hosted domain – I therefore use it with another Google login) and I really wanted to comment as such. I typed a pithy little comment, hit post and was greeted by this;
Sorry but I am not going to fill in a multi-field, multi-part registration to leave a simple comment.
This begs lots of questions around single sign-on and federation of registration across services – but it also tells us one thing – any barrier to participation is a bad thing.
