Interviews From The Cloud Identity Summit, Part II: Patrick Harding and Why Passwords Are Like Hamburgers

Sorry for the re-post if you’ve seen this before, but I realized in the confusion resulting from my job change there’s no longer a clear posting of my interview with Ping Identity’s CTO Patrick Harding.  In it, he shows why why we need to work towards elimination of the many extra passwords we currently must have for the cloud apps we use.

In a related, timely announcement, Twitter now requires that all apps that want to use it (like the popular  Tweetdeck desktop and mobile client) must use OAuth instead of prompting you for your Twitter account and password. What does this mean? It means fewer userids and passwords you must create (and keep track of) because it’ll happen automagically between the app and Twitter.

Now if Tweetdeck would just use OAuth or OpenID for its own accounts, we could use our Google or Live or Yahoo or Facebook or other pre-existing identity provider instead of creating yet another userid and password.

Follow Sean Deuby on Twitter at @shorinsean.