Plancast almost had me
Plancast is a service for sharing your upcoming plans with friends. From what I was reading today, it's a two-man team that raised some money and were looking to expand so I decided to give them a whirl. They have the Facebook and Twitter one-click registration solutions right there on the front page, so I chose Twitter, authorized the application and was redirected not back to the app as I'd hoped, but to an incomplete registration form that I would need to fill out if I wanted to continue. Even though they'd already harvested all of my info from Twitter, as seen in the second screencap, they still wanted me to do more work to include providing an email address, password and all of my location info, which Twitter does provide in a basic format, albeit without country info, a problem which a script could solve. And now, since I declined to provide all of the information required, I'm caught in circular registration hell. Plancast, you almost had me as a user, but I'm going to have to decline until you figure the mess out. Let me help you me desired user profile: I'm already a member of two social networks with a combined membership of circa half a billion users. Not looking to join another network, create another account or hand out even more info I'll have to manage, like my email address. I just want to use your application and share it with my friends, not make new friends on your network. Let's pretend that there are no new networks to create for the next four to eight years and simply deal with the established ones we have now. If and when your iPhone app is available, I'd probably download it and use the geolocation features which I assume you're going to include, so you won't need me to enter (and maintain) any of my location info on your web app. You can simply update your database with my location info you harvest from the iPhone. I'm a simple man and like things to be uncomplicated. If you're going to offer registrations using Facebook Connect or Twitter Authentication, you could at least honor those methods when the user agrees to use them. Oh, and featuring Robert Scoble as your top user are grounds for rejection right there.
