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eBay Retires MS Passport Sign-In
fihzy writes "eBay have announced they will retire Microsoft Passport Sign-In and .NET alerts. The Microsoft Passport Directory of Sites has been discontinued, too. Is Microsoft's Single Sign-On vision edging towards oblivion?"
Heh, yeah, that's true, Passport tends to lose your authentication cookie more often that a 3-year-old would lose his toys. You have financial losses, I would just get frustrated.
On top of that I used their hotmail account to register for the Passport, since that's their recommended option. I never use Hotmail for my daily webmail, in fact, the only message I have there is a thank-you for signing up. The bozos from hotmail kept threatening me with turning off the account, and they did execute their threats every 90 days. So unless I remember to log in to the Hotmail account, which I never use, I lose my passport, and have to go through easy but still frustrating retrival system at hotmail.
The guys who designed this system are probably competing with Clippy team on who builds the most annoying product.
I used to work on a similar system for another major portal business, although only for our own portfolio of websites, and we took this stuff really seriously for a while. When eBay joined, we were starting to get a bit scared, because if the passport thing had taken off, our business would have gone bye-bye.
.Net services was that MS intended not only to store a username and password, but store ALL user information. Participating sites would then have free access to the information they contributed to the system, but would have to pay for anything else. Also, using the entire .Net portfolio would have made it simple for web developers to build a system with a "secure" passport logon and user database, but VERY difficult to obtain control over their own data. Microsoft, on the other hand, would have complete access to all user data regardless of source. They could have become the gatekeeper, the only company with control over user data, and everyone else paying them for data mining rights in their own data. We should be VERY thankful that it didn't take off.
.Net.
The worst thing about Passport and the related
In retrospect, Microsoft made a bunch of mistakes:
1) The whole thing got muddled in the general confusion of
2) Most other web companies actually valued control of their user data more than ease of development.
3) No user demand for single sign-on, either because users don't care, or because they actually value their privacy and don't want different websites to share user data.
It's finally gone. Good riddance.