I’ve noticed a few new services that have replaced the traditional registration form (email/password) with email as an alternative sign-up method.

TripIt, a travel service that creates a single, readable online itinerary from your flight, hotel or rental confirmation is the first site I noticed doing this. To register, a user simply forwards a hotel, flight or rental confirmation email to plans@tripit.com. The site automatically registers you and replies with a confirmation and link to your new itinerary. Brilliant. (Note: TripIt also provides the classic registration form as well).

What’s important about this is that they’re reducing a psychological barrier to entry. Most people using Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail, etc. feel signing up for yet another online service is an annoyance. After a while, another registration form can feel like a burden. Email-based registration avoids this barrier by rolling registration and the way you interact with the service into one action. For example, the same way you use TripIt is the same way you sign up, by forwarding emails to plans@tripit.com.

Of course, form-less registration doesn’t fit for every solution. While flushing out the IA for ImageSpark, our home-brewed creative inspiration tool, we decided upon the classic email/password registration. The reason being that the core interaction with the site isn’t done through email but rather integrated browser and desktop upload tools; For ImageSpark, there was no gain in baking in an email-based registration. (Although we hope this won’t stop people from using it.)

A service like Posterous however, which uses email to create and update a blog, is built on avoiding forms at all costs. It makes sense than that your first email registers you and initiates your first blog post, all in one.

I’m pretty sure we’ll see form-less registration grow into a design pattern as new services emerge. And I’m looking forward to using it, so long as the situation is right.

Following the inauguration, whitehouse.gov has been updated to reflect the Obama administration’s promise to use interactive media to make government more open and accessible.

I’m assuming the Presidential Pets section will get a good amount of traffic too.

Just released LinkedIn Applications... so good to link my Slideshare and our Blog right into LinkedIn. This should have happened months ago. I would like to connect my Twitter to it…

I am reasserting my Valentine’s Day post that RIM should buy LinkedIn.

I’m not sold on NYTimes.com new feature, TimesPeople, a social tool designed to share your activity – reading, rating, commenting – with other NYT members. If you’re a recent reader of NYT, you’ve probably noticed a floating bar appear above the content that prompts you to sign up for it.

Here’s an excerpt of the description from the FAQ:

...when you recommend an article, comment on a blog post, or rate a movie or restaurant, these activities will become visible to other TimesPeople users in a special toolbar at the top of every NYTimes.com page. You’ll also have a personal page that keeps track of your TimesPeople activities and lets you browse your network of readers.

The problem, as I see it, is that I’m not solely the selector of what information gets disseminated. And that is what is really at the core of the social web; It’s not automation, spewing every action I take for friends to consume and filter through themselves (unless you have a sophisticated filtering mechanism like Facebook’s wall). It’s about happenstance, finding and sharing that amazing article, restaurant review or inflammatory comment that you know certain friends will appreciate.

And the legwork (registration, adding friends, etc) to do that in a new tool is just not worth the time it used to be. Why not leverage the friend network I already have on Facebook? An app on Facebook that does the same thing would involve less investment and probably have more reach. I’m on Facebook more than I am on the Times, which would be the only place I could see my friend’s browsing activity using this tool. Ed. note: There is a Facebook application that works with TimesPeople.

Regardless, I’ve always had respect for the New York Times and what Khoi Vinh’s team has been doing for online. I wish them the best success at it but as a daily reader myself, you won’t see me signing up anytime soon.

Recently, Digg hired Allen & Co. to “explore its options” which is how Investment Bankers say “for sale”.

For a site like Digg it is natural that the managers and investors would be looking for an out. What is unusual is that its users feel they have a right to tell Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose how to run their business.

In sites like Digg where users create almost all of the value of the site, do they have a say in the future of the site?

Companies love the idea of social media because their users do the work. They create the content, they create the network effects, they create the page views. But they also gain a sense of entitlement. They feel like they created the site.

Compare this to other current mergers. In the Microsoft Yahoo merger, most users don’t really care (except Flickr users who protested). I bet no one other than Wall Street really cares about Delta’s proposed merger with Northwest.

This is the dilemma of social media. What obligations do sites have to their users when it comes to business decisions that impact the user experience?

Eric Schmidt from Google decides it’s time to define Web 3.0.

An article in Advertising Age asked a panel of digital experts for their thoughts on the biggest trend or challenge in today’s online space.

Not surprisingly, many of the answers pointed to the evolution of online video. Obviously, that’s a huge question that we’ve written about here before. It’s also especially top-of-mind right after the Super Bowl.

Many people also talked about the need to coordinate across all channels and eliminate the walls between them and help create a more unified connection to the consumer. That’s an issue that we think about every day here at Teehan + Lax, so I was glad to read those comments.

But I think the best response was this one, from Coca Cola’s Shane Steele:

“One key challenge for marketers is to determine how to evaluate and choose from the ever-expanding new-media and advertising options. While there is simply not enough time and resources to take advantage of every opportunity, it’s imperative that marketers evolve with the changing media landscape.

“The ideal is to identify and test new platforms that offer a first-mover advantage, that are measurable and that can be scaled effectively to deliver a significant return on investment. From a process perspective, this requires risk tolerance, rigor and speed, which can be significant challenges for organizations to overcome.”

Here is a great idea for a site. PriceProtectr monitors sites with price guarantees and let’s you know if the price of an item changes. If it does, PriceProtectr sends you an email and let’s you know you’re eligible for a rebate.

I wonder, if this site is succesful, it could actually put itself out of business. Retailers offer price guarantees knowing a high percentage of people will never take advantage of it.

By increasing redemptions, PriceProtectr could actually, make price guarantees uneconomical for retailers. A little example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

A very interesting new video product called Adbrite has launched. It is a great product for embedable video.

Here is how it works. You upload a video to Youtube or another video sharing site. Tell Adbrite where to find the video. Adbrite imposes a watermark and adds advertising in a fairly non intrusive way to the video stream. You can generate revenue from the videos you upload even if someone embeds the video on their site. It also allows advertisers a way to interject advertising into the user generated content video world.

YouTube to copy in 3, 2, 1…

Yesterday, Yahoo launched You Witness News, a site that allows users to upload photos and videos for use on Yahoo News and Reuters.

Both companies remain vague about their plans for this site. I suspect there is something brewing beyond publishing Joe_User’s photos on Yahoo News.

One of the mysteries is the benefit to the user. Right now, there isn’t any user generated content so it’s impossible to tell if there will be photo or video credits. What about monetary compensation? As other companies build out similar systems surely the dollar will play a role as to who gets “my scoop”.

I think the bigger story lurking here is around local content. Yahoo is going to be capturing great local content and will no doubt be leveraging it. I’ll be following this closely, as I’m sure many local TV and newspaper sites will as well.