Ma.gnolia Stops Spam With OpenID

After getting over 75 percent of new users being spam, social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia decided to stop using standard email registration and use OpenID. It appears that the service now also supports Facebook, Yahoo, Clickpass, AOL and a number of other standard identification programs to register.

It’s great that the Ma.gnolia team has made the switch but I wonder why they decided to support all the login methods that they do. For instance, what is the value of using that someone is Facebook user 91232352 but not knowing their email address? Currently Facebook doesn’t release email information whereas with OpenID, the email address is released during the registration process.

I have a feeling that we are going to see an increasing trend of login standardization but don’t expect all of the big players to adopt the standards anytime soon. While Yahoo! has accepted OpenID as a standard for logging in, not all of the other players like Facebook have accepted this format. Ma.gnolia is making a statement with this decision to support OpenID and I applaud it.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.