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No-Registration Web Services

Published June 18th, 2007 in Tech & VC

I dig web services that are so lightweight that they don’t require a registration or login and yet still offer significant value that competitive services only offer with a login.

For example:

  • Craigslist - Post all you want without ever creating a login. Each time you post, your email address is used to setup a one-time account. It’s simple, efficient, and still feature rich. Competitors not only require login, they often require payment for equivalent service.
  • Senduit - Send huge files to other people. The only thing you ever need to give the service is the file and an expiration date. Not even an email address required. By comparison YouSendIt (a competitor) requires the recipient’s email address, sender’s email address, message, file, and ToS acceptance.
  • Wikipedia - No login required in order to further the world’s collective knowledge. Just click “edit this page” and get to work. By comparison, Encyclopedia Britannica requires a login just to view articles. The whole site is behind a pay wall.
  • Last.fm - Listen to unlimited “artist radio” on the splash page. The only information required is the name of the artist. By comparison, Pandora requires registration after a fixed number of songs. This example is particularly irksome because there’s nothing about playing music that technically requires Pandora to request registration. Pandora is intentionally crippling their service in order to increase the number of registered users.
  • BugMeNot - This final example is a little different. It’s a service that allows for collective use of registrations for access to sites for registration. So, returning to the example of Pandora, if you want access to unlimited music without registering, just cruise to this BugMeNot search for “Pandora”, grab the highest rated collective login credentials, and go. This service works particularly well for content sites (like newspapers’ online portals) that clearly don’t technically need to require registration, but do so out of greed for higher ad revenues.

I am interested in web services that don’t require registration in part because I register for hundreds of sites per year (such is the life of a VC analyst), and often times, I don’t feel like registration is necessary for the value the service is offering me. So, it irks me that I’m filling out yet another registration form without a clear purpose.

In all of these examples, the product managers on these products probably thought, “if I require registration, I can add XYZ cool feature which requires persistence of data across sessions.” Or “If I require registration, I will get better data reporting in order to optimize and monetize my service.” I appreciate the product managers that thought twice and resisted the urge to require registration for either of these reasons. Both reasons are legitimate. But, great product design comes from simplifying a service to loudly convey its core value proposition, and registration is often a point of complication that can be reduced.

9 Responses to “No-Registration Web Services”  

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  1. 1 Darren Herman Jun 18th, 2007 at 2:52 pm

    Persistence across log-ins is great - fair enough to the product manager. However, what about learning about your user base? Isn’t that valuable?

    Also, what type of sites are you referring to? A site like SalesForce.com will need registration as it holds significant data from a particular user. However, Craigslist is a site that you browse… doesn’t really need registration data. The only data you send it is if you want to post a “classified” ad.

    I’d argue that Craigslist could become much more “intelligent” if you registered and it learned (based on keyword, and other tracking) about your usage behavior to provide more relevant results.

  2. 2 Andrew Parker Jun 18th, 2007 at 3:25 pm

    That’s exactly the trade-off I’m talking about. Craigslist could require registrations and they could learn a lot more about their users’ patterns and enhance the service. But, doing so would sacrafice the lightweight feeling of being about to do everything on the site without creating an account. I think I prefer the latter to the former.

    In the case of a site like Salesforce.com, there’s no choice. Data has to persist across logins to provide any useful functionality, plus Salesforce needs to collect billing info. But, I’d love to see a lightweight service try to take on a Salesforce-esque solution without registration. I have trouble imagining it, but that makes me all the more eager to see it.

  3. 3 Lee Semel Jun 18th, 2007 at 9:44 pm

    I’m working on a site that could potentially be used to send spam, but otherwise is pretty lightweight — I’m wondering if it’s better to not have registration but require people to fill out a captcha every time, or require registration once and then keep it persistent. Both options seem equally annoying, but I’m leaning to registration as a less-annoying option.

  4. 4 candice Jun 20th, 2007 at 10:24 am

    Registration annoys the hell out of me, personally. So tired of signing up for stuff.

    You forgot to mention del.icio.us as something that works well without a login, too.

    Lee, what about running messages through filters for spamminess?

  5. 5 Andrew Parker Jun 20th, 2007 at 10:44 am

    Seconded Candice.

    Regarding running messages through filters for spamminess, how about Akismat? I’m a huge fan of that service. I have it on both the USV corp blog and my personal blog.

  6. 6 candice Jun 20th, 2007 at 7:03 pm

    Or even spamassassin, or some variant thereof, if it’s an email-ish thing.

    A filter layer is useful to have, because later you can plug whatever into it, change solutions, whatever. (Think amavis’s style of virus spam scanning, if you’ve used it.)

  7. 7 Bartek_rac Jun 29th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

    Also picnik.com offers really great functionality without registration required.

  8. 8 Peter Verkooijen Jul 5th, 2007 at 7:12 am

    No registration is fine for free stuff for anonymous people. If you want to do anything a bit more serious and need to know who your audience/customer is, I don’t see a way around it.

    Craigslist is a mess for a reason.

    Registration is annoying though. I hope someone comes up with a better identity management solution.

  9. 9 Ross Hill Aug 13th, 2007 at 2:27 am

    I’ve been thinking about a few ways that I could go about registration for a restaurant review website. Requiring registration seems to be the best way to go. Without it spam is going to be huge.

    Sure it would be nice if you didn’t have to register but unless your site is just a “feature” like bugmenot or picnik there is so much more value in registering.

    How hard is it? It annoys me too but most places you only need an email address and a password and maybe a couple of other fields. I bet you use the same username and password everywhere you go anyway, it’s not like it requires thought. Are we just being too picky?

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