I'm warming up to membership

I used to really be against the concept of forced membership for web sites, and fought hard for anonymous personalization. (It's good to see that people have developed workarounds.) The web's gotten so membership-centric these days that it seems you can't use any Web 2.0 applications without a login. It just irked me that services couldn't be used without belonging to a system. It was lethargy more than privacy or fear of commercialization of my info - as a user I didn't want to go through the extra step of registration, and as a developer didn't enjoy validating, (re)routing and conditionally displaying content based on inclusion.

I begrudgingly wrote systems like blogs and photo galleries that used membership where appropriate. But I've since gotten over my anti-membership days, mainly because out of ubiquity.

I you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I guess...