Please Don’t Ask For My Email.
Just don’t
Today I signed up for storify, before signing up I was given 3 options to signup, use my Facebook account to signup, use my Twitter account to signup, or use my email account and password to signup.
Personally I don’t like the email signup system, you need to give an email and a password and then go and check my inbox for a conformational email, which sometimes take hours to come or may end up in my spam folder. I just like the quick signup system like using my Facebook or Twitter account, one click and then done.
Coming back to the story, so because Facebook is kinda private and because they asked too much permission for my liking I used my Twitter account for signing up, when I signed up I was greeted with a new page asking for my email address, meh.
Why does a service need my email address when I signup with my Twitter or Facebook account, I’m not just talking about storify, I’ve come across many more services that asks for my email, password and sometimes asks my to confirm my email account when signing up using my Twitter or Facebook accounts.
What’s the point of asking my email address if I signup with a service using Twitter or Facebook account? Am I going to forget my password? No because there are no password, you can get all the information you want to make a complete profile using the users Twitter or Facebook account, and if you want to send email notifications you can do something like this ,
If it’s Facebook, it’s easy to get the users Facebook username, so his Facebook email address is “facebook_user_name@facebook.com” and you can easily send notifications to that.
If it’s twitter still you can get Twitter username, so you can send a direct message to the users Twitter inbox using the same user account, even without asking permission for Twitter inbox (but you need the post Tweet permission) , by sending a Tweet to “d @username Notification here” so the notification will land in my Twitter inbox.
Pretty simple isn’t it? So if you using Facebook connect or Twitter to signup users, just don’t ask email address or confirm email address, it’s pretty annoying.
