Amazon Announces Login with Amazon

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1824961&highlight=

by wanghq • 13 years ago

163 92 13 years ago

mmastrac• 13 years ago

Alright, but the question is "why would someone want to log in with Amazon"? There's no social network attached to your Amazon account. It seems like it would be an odd choice of identity provider, unless you are a store and already using Amazon's fulfillment services.

gtaylor2• 13 years ago

I'm not too sure, for my purposes. I was trying to think of some ways we could use this, but I'm just not seeing it. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, though.

Can anyone provide some neat examples for cases in the context of web applications? Their mobile app examples didn't really speak to me.

jasonlotito• 13 years ago

Login with Amazon. Now the person has one-click purchasing power. Or most likely, a credit card on file, which is more valuable then a Facebook profile without any CC on file, especially in the context of a web application.

MatthewPhillips• 13 years ago

If I was selling something I would want to use Login with Amazon. This press release doesn't specify, but potentially they could add a one-click purchase API, which would be very nice.

runevault• 13 years ago

This is the sort of thing I was assuming as well, if it let you tie in to doing purchases via amazon's payment API (though I'd still expect another request for password during purchase, but it would pre-assume account) could be useful, if leveraged correctly.

runako• 13 years ago

There's not a social network, but there's a "money" network attached to your Amazon account (i.e. your credit card) From the article:

>> "over 200 million active Amazon customers"

That's 200 million verified credit cards of people who are comfortable with ecommerce. There's arguably some value in that.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

For some reason it strikes me as a pretty good idea. Upon further reflection, I think it has something to do with:

- Trust -- people increasingly distrust sites like Facebook or Google (privacy concerns), but Amazon still has pretty much entirely "positive" feelings for consumers. And if they can run AWS as well as they can, then you assume you can trust them with your password too

- Micropayments -- your credit card is already linked to your Amazon account, presumably, so it suddenly enables you to pay for content, etc. on a wide range of sites where you might not otherwise, due to friction and trust issues

It's funny... for some undefinable "fuzzy" reason, I feel much more willing to log into a site using Amazon credentials, than I would with Google, Facebook or even Apple.

ollysb• 13 years ago

That's probably because you're a paying customer rather than a pair of eyeballs to them.

mustafakidd• 13 years ago

Absolutely agree - I'd love to be able to use my account on other merchant's sites without having to enter cc info.

walls2• 13 years ago

> "why would someone want to log in with Amazon"?

> There's no social network attached to your Amazon account

I think you answered your own question.

jaynos• 13 years ago

This. I avoid accidentally posting some garbage to my facebook wall.

I'll finally start using "Log on with" if I can use Amazon.

mikeash2• 13 years ago

What does a social network have to do with it? I thought that logging in using a third-party account was simply a way to ease signups and limit password/account explosion, nothing to do with "social" anything. Certainly that's how I use it.

Fuzzwah• 13 years ago

Have a quick look through the comments of the letsbeamigos.com show HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5781313

ActVen• 13 years ago

Why? Because there isn't a social network attached to it. I don't have to create another username/password and I can possibly avoid entering credit card details into another site if I decide to do business with them. Why not is a better question.

aioprisan2• 13 years ago

I don't have up to date addresses and payment methods anywhere else, besides PayPal, but I'm far more active on Amazon. That's a great way to turbo charge sales.

aioprisan2• 13 years ago

on second look, it's just a login system, no payment integration https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/lwa/dev/...

bluthru• 13 years ago

I think you have to integrate that separately:

https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business/asp

tracker1• 13 years ago

Personally, I don't like "login with facebook" everywhere, because every site wants permission to "post to your wall" even when not logged in, etc... Personally, I find this unconscionable. I find the same thing happens with Google these days for single-signon... I'd much rather have a common/popular oauth provider that does NOT have a social integration piece. I don't want invites to every game you play, and don't want them sent out to my friends.

Google was really close to this for me before the Google+ thing. At least with amazon, acting as a purchase gateway is an additional bonus.

Torrents• 13 years ago

Because it's not Facebook.

x0x0• 13 years ago

amazon wants you to do so for advertising purposes, and this is particularly important given the implications of firefox's 3rd party cookie policy / dnt. Amazon is actually quite a large ad vendor: they allow you to retarget based on purchases and because they've run out of inventory on amazon proper, they buy on exchanges. Running a login system means they can track you around the internet, and this nicely dovetails with ff's new cookie policy since amazon will most likely be on of the sites you've visited and hence a permitted 3rd party cookie. This is a valuable dataset for an advertiser, and even more importantly, will allow 3rd party targeting to continue to work.

This is also why fb / twitter / G run 3rd party login systems.

hemancuso• 13 years ago

I was shocked to discover this is the canonical URL & domain for the Amazon press releases. After I clicked the link and saw the URL I initially thought this was some bizarre phishing scheme.

That being said, I think this is a great idea. I don't love the Facebook OAuth flow and the amount of access most apps ask for. I have trouble taking Twitter seriously as an OAuth provider [bias much?]. I think there are many US-focused companies who will be excited to have Google & Amazon as the two default OAuth authentication providers. If nothing else, it's much more adult than Twitter/Facebook. Oh, and Amazon has your credit card info and a great platform for SaaS billing :)

criley2• 13 years ago

I agree. I love OAuth idea and the single-sign on flow. I love having one source where I can go and see all of the sites that have my info, and I love being able to rescind my account from that central location.

However, I hate that Facebook/Twitter take it a step further with all of their social integration features to the point where many apps assume, by default, that you want to share share share everything you do all over your social network.

As I've found a number of apps/websites that do not allow you to continue without giving them permission to post on your wall, I've been forced to mark every single app/OAuth site on my Facebook as available to "only me". Post all you want, no one will ever see it.

Curating what gets posted under your name shouldn't be this much work. I shouldn't have to strive for a clean digital presence with content that adds something to my readers life.

I'd love an OAuth provider that HAS NO SOCIAL NETWORK!

And Google is out on this too, sorry, but Google Plus is obviously the only web property that Google cares about anymore and trusting them not to socialify everything is a fools game.

r4vik2• 13 years ago

Amazon does have a social network though https://kindle.amazon.com/, actually two now with the aquisition of goodreads

rdl3• 13 years ago

I'd rather use one with an exceptionally good security policy (including account recovery), realtime multi-modal notification, customizable settings (i.e. being able to ip/geo restrict, rate limit, etc.), etc. And maybe do groups, too.

Google Apps for Your Domain could be kind of like this, but isn't. Probably the closest, though.

Maybe someone like Dropbox/Box.Net/AeroFS?

hayksaakian• 13 years ago

I though persona by Mozilla was basically this.

elithrar• 13 years ago

> I'd love an OAuth provider that HAS NO SOCIAL NETWORK!

GitHub, BitBucket?

Both are actually good options if you have a service with developer demographic (even if its just in part). I'm using Google & GitHub right now, and will likely add Amazon since it's very little work to do so.

loganfrederick• 13 years ago

The URL is quite common among large corporations and is used by, off the top of my head, Gamestop and NVIDIA.

www.google.com/search?q=corporate-ir.net

buggyURLs• 13 years ago

Yeah, but that URL behaves really weird, when you try requests for the domain without any actual URI at the end.

For example:

http://phx.corporate-ir.net

http://www.corporate-ir.net

http://www.ccbn.com < I somehow got redirected there...

Also:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:corporate-ir.net

arscan2• 13 years ago

Regarding the URL: Amazon (and just about every public company in the US) outsources the investor relations portion of their site, because it is easier to do so than to integrate the feeds mandated by the SEC on their public site themselves (stock quote, press releases, sec filings, etc). There are 2 major competitors in this space, and the one that Amazon chose has these ugly URLs.

I'm surprised that they haven't made this better since that platform (phoenix) was designed in the mid-2000s. I presume that nobody really cares enough to put money into migrating it to a url scheme that is more sensible... the site exists to satisfy the SEC, and serious investors get their news/stock data from other sources anyhow.

smackfu• 13 years ago

>I was shocked to discover this is the canonical URL & domain for the Amazon press releases.

It seems like it is outsourced investor relations. Funny thing is that if you go to the bare domain, it redirects you to ccbn.com, which doesn't work because CCBN (Corporate Communications Broadcast Network) got bought out in January and apparently killed their domain too. That's pretty shoddy.

300bps• 13 years ago

>That being said, I think this is a great idea. I don't love the Facebook OAuth flow and the amount of access most apps ask for.

You bring up a perfect point from a user's perspective and I agree with you. The challenge for Amazon is that there are two competing interests:

1. Users who don't want their entire life to be open to developers

2. Developers that want as much info as possible on the users

Facebook favors group #2 above, Amazon will probably favor group #1 above. If that ends up being the case, how many developers will be willing to utilize the OAuth service that doesn't give them as much info by default?

nucleardog• 13 years ago

If Amazon were as ubiquitous as Facebook, we would.

In most situations where we've used a Facebook login, it's simply to avoid forcing the users to create yet another account. We don't pull any real data (except maybe a couple things, again, for their convenience - to fill out their profile) like their name. We push nothing back.

Being able to say "Hey, just login. We don't actually care about your information." would be much preferable to Facebook's unnecessary "This app is requesting permissions to access your profile and friends list." We don't need that information.

I guess maybe that's our fault for abusing Facebook integration by using it simply as a single sign-on service.

Anonazon• 13 years ago

If you have any doubts about which customer Amazon is more interested in, just take a look at this new AWS service and the APIs

http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/29/amazon-web-services-launche...

unhammer• 13 years ago

If you have trouble with Facebook and Twitter, how is Amazon/Google better? They all have great engineering teams, but they also all make money on data mining – not the best feature of a login provider (2013-05-30: jrandomhacker successfully logged in to PersistentGenitalArousalDisorder.com … let's show some relevant ads next time his in-laws are near the computer).

I'd stick with Mozilla Persona.

jaredcwhite• 13 years ago

I'll echo what some of the other commenters are saying, namely that for anything e-commerce related (and I'd argue SaaS-type software) this method of login makes most sense. If you were going to sign up for a free trial of something or create an account at a store, would you want to login with Facebook or Twitter? Or Amazon, whom you likely already trust with your money. The latter I'd say.

On the other hand, if I have a social or news/content site, FB and Twitter login makes the most sense. That way I have access to their social graph as well as an indentity.

Anyway, this is pretty cool. I think I'll integrate Login with Amazon with my startup (mariposta.com) pretty soon, as it very well could lessen signup friction. We'll see.

bertyoo• 13 years ago

Won't be using this.

kmfrk• 13 years ago

The more the merrier. I only feel comfortable using my Twitter log-in, and I don't have any privacy reservations with Amazon either.

Turing_Machine3• 13 years ago

Yes. Amazon itself is undoubtedly data mining your purchase history, but at least they're not spewing your personal info to every random Serfville/PirateWars "games" that one of your friends signs up for (yes, I know that you can turn most of that off, and I have; most people don't).

Everything I've heard and experienced indicates that Amazon is pretty tight with customer information. Certainly you don't get any personal information on customers when you sell ebooks through the Kindle store. Apple is also pretty good about that.

6cxs2hd6• 13 years ago

This is about the four horsemen -- Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google -- and how Amazon is moving forward with Facebook and Google, and perhaps into the lead.

The true purpose of Google+ is to accumulate more information about you, not to be a "social network" per se. The latter is the means to the former.

Amazon has a huge amount of exceptionally high quality ecommerce information. They have "only" 200 million users, but info about what they actually like -- because they buy it -- not what they say they like. Plus, for search -- if you're searching for products/pricing, you might already use Amazon not Google.

Login helps Amazon extend information beyond ecommerce -- and potentially pull clearly in the lead in that regard compared to Facebook and Google.

Apple...has a problem in this regard. Excellent company in many respects, but falling out of the pack in this regard.

p.s. In all of the above I'm only talking about it from the company perspective. If you think it's not necessarily a good thing for a company to have even more complete data about you, I wouldn't argue with you.

chj• 13 years ago

Apple doesn't even know how to offer an analytics tool for app developers.

olympus• 13 years ago

I understand that this is a good idea for Amazon because it is good for them to keep people within their ecosystem, but this is what I think of whenever someone announces a product that has already been made several times: http://xkcd.com/927/

rdl3• 13 years ago

I wish I could OAuth with my hn login!

soapdog2• 13 years ago

I'd rather use Mozilla Persona based login systems than OAuth based ones. From both a user and a developer point of view, Persona is a very refreshing approach to identity instead of OAuth.

For those wanting to know more about Persona, check out https://login.persona.org/about

also since Persona is from Mozilla, you can see all the code and development and you know that privacy and user safety are number one priority.

bitskits• 13 years ago

I'm having trouble finding sites that use Persona as a login option. Does anyone have any examples? Trovebox seems to have a demo site up, but I was not able to actually log in to my account.

nswanberg• 13 years ago

http://crossword.thetimes.co.uk/

Click the "Log In" button at the top to see the Persona login screen.

rachelbythebay• 13 years ago

Two of mine:

https://rachelbythebay.com/store/ - just put this up yesterday - easy enough.

http://scanner.rachelbythebay.com/main - this one's been using Persona since it was called browserid. (Hit the gear on a call to see the login prompt - you only need the login for certain extended functions)

shmerl3• 13 years ago

https://diaspora-project.org

StavrosK4• 13 years ago

And two of mine:

http://www.deadmansswitch.net/account/login/ (click "BrowserID login", my UX isn't great).

http://www.yourpane.com/ (click Persona without entering an email address, my UX isn't great).

zobzu• 13 years ago

Ditto. Why isn't HN supporting persona? :)

callahad• 13 years ago

A few other favorites: http://meta.discourse.org, http://debuggex.com, https://voo.st, and http://sloblog.io

StavrosK4• 13 years ago

Exactly. I hope so much that Persona takes off. It's a breeze to implement, taking barely five minutes to add to your site from scratch, versus the hours traditional sign up takes, it's decentralized (you can easily become your own provider, etc https://www.persowna.net) and it's very very convenient.

If you're making something, please please add Persona to the list of login methods. If you're currently using emails for logins, it's even backwards-compatible.

xsace• 13 years ago

I hate Amazon login where I can't reuse any old passwords as a new one or even as part of the new one.

It makes it just impossible to remember your login when you reset it a few times, because you need to learn a new one.

r4vik2• 13 years ago

why are you remembering passwords?

jeffbarr• 13 years ago

You can also integrate this with your own apps via AWS / IAM:

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/05/aws-iam-now-supports-amaz...

youngerdryas• 13 years ago

This could be a game changer for web payments and the built-in A/B testing sounds cool but I couldn't find any details in the docs.

kriro• 13 years ago

Seems like a great idea and a signup option that will spread quickly. Mostly because Amazon accounts tend to be linked to payment options already so you essentially add people who are used to and willing to play online to your site.

cmsmith• 13 years ago

This is excellent, as I would love to have a shared login provider whose business model does not revolve around sharing my information (e.g. twitter, facebook, google). I really don't want everyone on my [friends list equivalent] to know every time I create an account anywhere on the internet, and I feel like I'm always one privacy setting away from that happening.

jwomers• 13 years ago

I think this is really great! As a customer, I'd much rather sign in with this than Facebook or Twitter, as then I know there would be no social side-effects - e.g. posting on my behalf or similar - which is sometimes anxious making when confronted with a social login button. This separates easy sign-in from social sharing.

rjohnk• 13 years ago

I DON'T WANT MORE LOGINS.

Pretty soon I'll go to "thenewestwebflatdesignstartup.com" and I'll be given these choices:

or create an account with email

Click here if you have no idea what account you used.

/rant

chatmasta• 13 years ago

So when are Amazon payments coming?

drivers99• 13 years ago

I just used Amazon payments today to buy the new Humble Bundle.

davidw• 13 years ago

They're kind of under the radar, but it's a pretty good system, actually, as tons of people already have Amazon accounts.

foobar4562• 13 years ago

OAuth is for authorization, not authentication. Please stop using it like this. If you want SSO-style authentication using OpenID or SAML2.

qu4z-23• 13 years ago

Unfortunately I think that ship has sailed. Personally I'm hoping Persona will catch on. At least that's designed as an authentication scheme.

foobar4562• 13 years ago

What problem does it solve that OpenID doesn't? OpenID already has a lot of adoption, and IMO works quite well.

brentm• 13 years ago

I think this could be really interesting. In my opinion, Login with Facebook creates a little bit of anxiety for customers. Everyone has been burned by unanticipated sharing & with this there is no social network to share to. I need to read the documentation (from a quick glance) it didn't seem like allowing people to checkout with Amazon on your site was possible but I bet that isn't far behind. That to me could be great if they are reasonable on commission rates.

gcr• 13 years ago

...This feels more like OpenID rather than OAuth. Could someone explain? I'm so confused.

qu4z-23• 13 years ago

People apparently think that OAuth is Open Authentication not Open Authorization. I think that ship has sailed, unfortunately. Although it still confuses me when I go to log in to a site and I get the pop-up about "Do you want to authorize this application to access <X>?"

EGreg• 13 years ago

Amazon is all about e-commerce, and their partners are reporting a 40% adoption rate for new signups? That sounds way higher than facebook's oauth ... if this continues, Amazon could be an awesome platform to build a business on! They also have a credit system now -- and inventory!

shmerl3• 13 years ago

I'd prefer Mozilla persona. Amazon as well as Facebook and etc. aren't trustworthy - they are tracking your activity and using them for external logins sounds like a very bad idea.

rubberband• 13 years ago

I get Facebook. But why is Amazon not trustworthy?

shmerl3• 13 years ago

How are they different from Facebook? They also have behavioral targeted advertisement.

crucio• 13 years ago

Can this be used for taking payments quickly from users?

jjuliano• 13 years ago

It seems that Login systems is becoming a fragmented space, there's Persona, Google, Oauth, Wordpress, etc. and now Amazon.

dripton• 13 years ago

I'd rather use Amazon than Google or Facebook, but I'd rather use a site that only did identity than any of the rest. (I don't want access to my Kindle books screwed up because Amazon decided I did something wrong when using them for login, and banned my account. Yes, that reminds me that I need to backup all my Kindle books monthly.)

I don't know what the business model for such a site would be, though.

jpalomaki• 13 years ago

My main problem with these (as user) is that I usually have hard time remembering which sign-on system I have used for a particular site. Twitter? Google? Facebook? Username and pass? Amazon?

In most cases what I would truly like to have is a option to order a sign-on link to my email that would be valid for single use and just for some minutes.

Amazon Announces Login with Amazon

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