The hardworking staff (and its wholly owned subsidiaries) has been on the nym wars – the battle over anonymity on the web – like Brown on Williamson (see Sneak ADtack! coverage here and here).
New grist for the mill (via the Center for Media Research):
Social Login Preferred to Site Registration
According to the Janrain Social Identity study, conducted by Blue Research, consumer frustration at being asked to register on a website continues to grow, and almost eight in ten people want social login to be offered as an alternative.
That is to say, 80% would apparently rather provide a verified identity (mostly through Facebook) than have the option of creating a new identity, including pseudonyms.
A new front in the nym wars.
Which, if you believe this survey, Facebook seems to be winning.
Campaign Outsider 
I bet this soon becomes the rule rather than the exception across the Internet. Unless they’re completely overwhelmed by an article and feel they MUST respond, I’d argue commenters evaluate whether the satisfaction they’ll receive by posting their reaction/opinion is worth the time/trouble it takes to do so. Lower the entry cost for commenting by allowing a near-universal social ID and it stands to reason more commenters will find the tradeoff worthwhile. Also, I find it rewarding to try to build a reputation as a commenter, so recording the number of comments I’ve made, as well as the number of reactions those comments spawned from others, across the whole range of sites I patronize allows me to carry that reputation across those sites, rather than having to build a reputation anew on each individual site.
One downside, though, is that each site I comment on then has access to my social networking information, and the amount/level of detail they receive is not easy to discern thanks to the intentional vagaries of Facebook’s privacy settings. In signing this comment, for instance, I didn’t want WordPress to have access to my Facebook account, so I found myself once again typing in my name, email and website data manually.
Don’t trust me, eh, Taylor? I’m glad you did comment, though – interesting stuff.
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