So we’re interested in making it as easy as possible to begin using FeVote. Right now, the only way to post and vote on suggestions is to register a FeVote account. (We offer an “API” so that Web services can let you use FeVote without registering. If you’re a Web service, ask if you’re interested.) We ask you to make up a username, password, verify you’re human, and to enter your email address. We don’t make you enter your email address twice; we don’t even make you verify it.

We think it should be even easier. Yahoo!’s Browser-Based Authentication (BBAuth) comes to mind, and so does OpenID.

BBAuth is Yahoo!’s offering to make it easier for Yahoo! users to login to participating Web services using their Yahoo! IDs. This is great for a couple reasons. Users don’t have to fill out yet another registration form, and so many people have Yahoo! accounts. This is almost perfect for FeVote, and we wish the other Goliaths, like Google, would offer the same service. There is one minor problem with BBAuth. It can tell us whether or not you have an account with Yahoo!, but it doesn’t tell us your Yahoo! username. So, the FeVote username we’d like to give you, which is yahoo-[your_yahoo_username_here], could be anything else you choose, which hurts BBAuth’s usefulness.

OpenID is the similar to BBAuth in that it helps people skip registration on certain sites, but it’s decentralized, meaning no one company really owns it (as Yahoo! technically owns your Yahoo! ID). Not as many people have OpenIDs as Yahoo! IDs, but it’s catching on. If you already have AOL/AIM or LiveJournal, you already have an OpenID. Otherwise, if you’re interested, you can get an OpenID here.

There’s no hard date that we expect to have OpenID or BBAuth ready, but we’ll leave you with this: as soon as possible!

FeVote is a place for you to make and vote on suggestions for the products and services you use. You can think of it as a constant petition of suggestions for companies. We call it a “social suggestions” website.

On FeVote, your suggestions are displayed for all to see and all to vote on. If your suggestion is good, other like-minded FeVoters will vote for it. The more votes, the better the chances of your suggestion getting noticed.

It beats the old method of sending your suggestion direct to a company, and hoping for an intelligent human response. (They’re hard to come by, but things are changing.)

For companies, FeVote solves the problem of organizing, tallying, and replying to inbound suggestions. By all means — a company is lucky to have inbound suggestions! But suggestion management is a job best left up to users/consumers, in a self-regulating space. With FeVote, you’ll get a bird’s eye view of what most users want. In fact, at any time, anyone can instantly see the suggestions that are most popular. Time is saved, and teams can focus on the needs and wants of users.

So, that about scratches the surface of FeVote. There is more to discuss, and there will be much more to come.

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