Cable channels and web accounts

Web accounts are like cable channels, in that too many can be a bad thing.

When cable TV arrived in my home town (many moons ago), the cable company provided two things: a cable into the house, and a magical box with a sliding channel selector. The channels ranged from 2 through 13, and then from 'A' to 'Z'. We dutifully dialed our TV to channel 3 and then selected channels using the magical box.

At first, the world of cable TV was an unexplored wilderness for us, with lots of channels we did not have with our older, over-the-air reception. We carefully moved from one channel to another, absorbing the new programs available to us.

The novelty quickly wore off, and soon we would "surf" through the channels, viewing each one quickly and then deciding on a single program to watch. It was a comprehensive poll of the available programs, and it worked with only 38 channels.

In a later age of cable TV, when channels were more numerous, I realized that the "examine every channel" method would not work. While you can skip through 38 (or even 100) channels fairly quickly, you cannot do the same for 500 channels. It takes some amount of time to peek at a single channel, and that amount of time adds up for large numbers of channels. (The shift from analog to digital slowed the progress, because digital cable lags as the tuner resets to the new channel.)

In brief, once you have a certain number of channels, the "surf all and select" method takes too long, and you will have missed some amount of the program you want. (With enough channels, you may have missed the entire program!)

What does all of this have to do with web accounts?

Web accounts have a similar effect, not related to surfing for content (although I suppose that could be a problem for a viewed a large number of web sites) but with user names and passwords. Web accounts need maintenance. Not daily, or weekly, or monthly, but they do need maintenance from time to time. Web accounts break, or impose new rules for passwords, or require that you accept a new set of terms and conditions.

For me, it seems that at any given time, one account is broken. Not always the same account, and sometimes the number is zero and sometimes the number is two, but on average it seems that I am fixing an account at least once per week. This week I have two accounts that need work. One is my Apple account. The other is with yast.com, who billed my annual subscription to two different credit cards.

With a handful of accounts, this is not a problem. But with a large number of accounts... you can see where this is going. With more and more accounts, you must spend more and more time on "maintenance". Eventually, you run out of time.

Our current methods of authentication are not scalable. The notion of independent web sites, each with its own ID and password, each with its own authentication mechanism, works for a limited number of sites, but contains an upper bound. That upper bound varies from individual to individual, based on their ability to remember IDs and passwords, and their ability to fix problems.

We will need a different authentication mechanism (or set of mechanisms) that is more reliable and simpler to operate.

We have the beginnings of standardized authentication. Facebook and Google logins are available, and many sites use them. There is also OAuth, an open source offering, which may also standardize authentication. It is possible that the US government will provide an authentication service, perhaps through the Postal Service. I don't know which will become successful, but I believe that a standard authentication mechanism is coming.