Vimeo's simple signup.

I love the simplicity of vimeo’s signup screen. It’s no frills. No password confirmation, no ajax to tell me if my username is available or not (i find that annoying). The only curious thing is the gender question, but it’s not like they’re asking for all that much information. Click finish and you’re done, “takes like 10 seconds” as they say on their homepage.

What frustrates me about webapps these days is the proliferation of similar features. Khoi Vinh pointed out that every app contains it’s own social network. Why stop there? Why can’t common information like my blog url, email address, phone number (for sms), bio, etc. all be controlled from a single location. Sort of like an OpenID for everything else. This is what Tom Coates was talking about in his Native to a Web of Data presentation, pushing beyond display and pages.

Update: More musings on identity from Tim O’Reilly and Joshua Porter