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Passwords suck, okay. What alternative is there?

Oauth helps, because people are more likely to have a decent password already for Gmail/Facebook/whatever than to make a new good password on the spot to try your site.

If you require an email address, you could send an email with a link (or code) to login and set a long loved cookie to keep users logged in. Again, it's likely that users will have a good password on their email.

Both of these options have negatives in that they tie your user to an external identity provider.

There could be a great opportunity for Google or Facebook to take the lead in managing user logins. The rest of the world could just piggy-back on one of those two. I'd love to never have to deal with password bullshit ever again as an app creator: I'll just make my users log in with Google/FB/etc.

And lose all those users who deleted their Facebook account, and don't want their Google account to be associated with more data than necessary.

> people are more likely to have a decent password already for Gmail/Facebook/whatever

Oh man... do I have news for you.

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