An opportunity for OAuth: Jeff “CodingHorror” Atwood highlights the password anti-pattern

Jeff Atwood brought up a problem that we’ve known about for quite awhile, have spent time documenting and working on and are finally on the verge of solving.

It’s important to highlight the seriousness and pervasiveness of this problem, and the degree to which people are still unaware that this pattern is a problem and even worse, that there are now ready solutions to make the process of getting access to your friends and contacts on third party sites that don’t require you to hand over your credentials. Once we standardize on a basic contact schema, it will only require adoption and implementation to obviate this insecure practice.