Google Makes the Case for Fewer Passwords

We live in a technology world with too many passwords. Earlier this year, Twitter's corporate email and Google Apps accounts were hacked by someone that took advantage of psychology instead of brute force. The problem is that most of us cope with all of our passwords by re-using the same password on multiple sites. If you can find or guess someone's password, you can manage to unlock email, bank accounts, shopping carts, and sensitive corporate data.

One solution is to force everyone to use multiple unique and hard to remember passwords. That's not really very practical. A better solution is to make a single password secure and seldom necessary to type out. Google would like to see us use a method called hybrid onboarding.  (For the geeks in the crowd, the "hybrid" is the combination of OpenID and OAuth standards.)

They developed the method with Plaxo and Facebook. It means that some services will never require a password at all. If you're logged into a "trusted' email account, such as Yahoo! or Gmail, you can log into websites using hybrid onboarding with two mouse clicks and no typing.

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