At Designing Social Interfaces, a pattern library that focuses on patterns for the social web, I found the The password Anti-Pattern particularly interesting.
In this pattern article Erin Malone explains how websites utilize third-party services for logging in. The idea behind the pattern is that you won’t have to remember a dozen different passwords for all the different services you’ve signed up for, but can do with just a few main account providers like Gmail, hotmail, or OpenID.
What do you think? Is this an actual pattern? The thought is definitely interesting, but using “Anti-” to me indicates a solution that is known to be “bad”.
toxboe
reds
16 Jan, 2009
Hi Anders,
Well, from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern), it says that anti-patterns “appears obvious but is ineffective or far from optimal in practice”.
Kinda agree that it makes it unsuitable for use there.