Dear Boston Globe…
Oct 4th, 2008 by JoeC
Just now, someone I follow on Twitter posted a link to what looks like an interesting article in the Boston Globe’s online site boston.com. So, I click on the link and instead of seeing the story, like I used to, I now get this:
Sigh…. I thought we’d gotten past this foolishness of forcing readers to sign up on your site just to read your content. Now I have to create yet another login ID and password that I have to remember.
If you go to the registration page you find this form:
As you can see, they want lots of personal information about you, including your job and household income. All I can say to you, Globe, is that it’s none of your damned business how much I make or where I work, how old I am or what town I live in. If you want to offer me something additional for putting in this information, then I might consider it. I don’t have to tell you this stuff to read the paper version, do I?
Why do I have to register for Boston.com?
We’re now asking the readers of Boston.com to register for two reasons. We’d like to:
- Improve your experience on the site by offering content and features tailored to your interests.
- Target the marketing messages you receive to make them more relevant and deliver a better value for our advertisers
Many newspaper Web sites require registration. Our hope is that our quick and easy registration process will minimize any inconvenience. The best part is that you only need to register once for full access for life.
This just doesn’t wash for me. For 1., using a regular old cookie, they can track what I look at without having me register. Once they do that, they can accomplish #2. If they really want to know where I live and how much I make, they can politely ask and let me say no. They should never force me to do it, though. That’s just making it hard for me to consume their content, and making my experience unpleasant.
I would consider paying for access to the Globe, just like I pay to get a paper copy as long as they didn’t get greedy about it. Maybe charge $1 year or $.10 per visit. That would provide them a revenue stream to offset the marketing information they get from making you register.
Now, let me offer a very reasonable alternative. The open protocol, open source, single sign-on technology for the web is OpenID. In the same way that a general credit card (e.g., MasterCard, Visa, AMEX) lets you avoid having to have a special credit card and account with every store, so OpenID lets you have one (or a small number) of Internet identifiers that can be used wherever OpenID is accepted. the Boston Globe should offer OpenID as an alternative means of authentication and registration. OpenID providers like MyOpenID.com and labs.verisign.com, as well as Yahoo, Flickr, WordPress.com and AOL all provide for demographic information if the user approves it. If the Globe offered OpenID as an alternative to creating yet another login/password (YALP?) and agreed to accept the level of demographic information I authorize through my OpenID provider, I would object far less to registering for the site.
What would really be cool is if I could associate a charge account with my OpenID, and simply by logging in and approving either once or every time I visit, pay the Globe for accessing their content.
And, by the way, Boston Globe, your parent company The New York Times, just attended the OpenID Content Provider Advisory Committee meeting in New York City. You’ve got no excuse! Get with the program!