I just redeemed a gift voucher of Rs 1000/- at indiaplaza.in , I had received it for my writings at sulekha.com . This is a good concept of cross promotions between web sites.
However, there is a scope for improvement. I had to register again at indiaplaza, which inconvenienced me, also added another password and user-id to remember! Oh No! Not another id, for God's sake.
So, is there an alternative? Sure there is one. No make it two.
The concept is called Single Sign On (SSO). There are many standards for SSO. The best is SAML.
Apart from being a standard, Google also uses it. You can find the details here:
http://code.google.com/apis/apps/sso/saml_reference_implementation.html
You you are a lazy programmer like me, you would find the open source enterprise quality at OpenSSO. Get the source code from https://opensso.dev.java.net/
The other simpler alternative is openid. Open id is a democratic alternative to Microsoft's passport. Thus the user can choose where one wishes to keep their personal details.
OpenSSO extensions supports openid.
So guys lets have a SSO for techTribe.com and sulekha.com, the sites I like!
