“Why don’t we use more services online?” Here is the most simple question that any Web user, from expert to beginner can answer: signing up over and over again to each and every new service is a pain. The Web is an open-platform, so it doesn’t make sense that users have to jump so many fences to hop from site to site.
Yesterday, I headed to the San Francisco’s Northbeach to interview Peter Nixey and Immad Akhund (and David Cole in the back) from Clickpass. The Clickpass team has developed a super-simplified tool that leverages the power of OpenID. Built on top of OpenID, Clickpass enables any site owner to make their subscription process as easy as logging into an existing account, which in turn leads to a growth of their user-base.
On the business side of things, Clickpass is not planning to gather information about users’ activities across different social platforms to sell it to advertisers (finally one company that respects the privacy of my social graph). Clickpass plans to sell their simple technology to other subscription-based sites. The target market is huge.
Making OpenID simple and accessible is just step one for Clickpass. So much more services can be built on top of their existing tool. The product launched last week, so the team is mainly focused on optimizing its usability and interacting with its early-adopters. Clickpass was seed-funded by Y Combinator, the venture firm behind Reddit, Disqus, Auctomatic, and many more trendy startups. I’ve started using Clickpass on Disqus (example in the video) and for the Hacker News site. Click here for the list of sites you log on using Clickpass.