Practicalmadness

An announcement has been made by Six Apart. I have only one, seemingly absurd comment:

There is no such thing as Secret Window.

Trust me, it will all make sense in the end. Well, actually, it won’t, but— hey, look, there’s Elvis! (pant pant pant why is running away so much like work?)

Okay, I will say this

The Six Apart crew keep alluding to their new TypeKey identity service — which is kind of like Microsoft Passport without the evil — as being open to third-party development, which here means that those of us with websites will be able to offer TypeKey sign-in for anything, not just comment registration in Movable Type 3.0.

Which means that Reader Services (or any other registery goodness someone comes up with) could be available to anyone who has ever left a comment on a TypeKey-enabled blog without additional registration. One secure user database maintained by people who, like, get paid to deal with customer problems can service us all. This is starting to excite the geek in me.

You may, in fact, be wondering why we even need registration for blog comments. A certain percentage of you may even have gotten stuck on this strange new word ‘blog’. However, those of us pathetically dateless enough to know about these things care about these things, especially when you wake up to a dozen new comments on your site only to find that they’re all from ‘veronka’ hawking penile implants on your pithy post about all the new soda products.

Thus comment registration. When it was first announced as part of MT 3.0, my big worry was having two different registration systems running on Practical. One reason why I even mess with Reader Services is that I can control every aspect of the experience there (albeit poorly), address problems if they occur and feel good about myself as a geek. If I can use TypeKey for Reader Services, that just makes my life so much easier it’s not even funny.