The next OnDemand Service – User Account Management

PutPlace.com is launching real soon now and of course like everybody else on the planet we rolled our own user account management (UAM) system (you know, registration, login, logout, forgot password, change username etc. etc.). Needless to say we used a Framework (in our case Django) but why do I need to reinvent this wheel?

We get our storage from Amazon (and soon our Grid). Our O/S is a flavour of Linux,  our Database is Postgres, we use surveymonkey for surveys and mailchimp (what is it with the simian metaphor?) for mail campaigns, why can’t I pay somebody on a per user basis to manage my user accounts?

What would this service look like? Well pretty much like a credit card payment interface looks like on the web today but with the following features.

•  a bunch of REST endpoints for all the standard UAM functions
  • Register
  • Login
  • Logout
  • Enable User
  • Disable User
  • Set Session Timeout
  • etc.
• Support for session management
• Standard reporting (who, when, from where, how long)
• Support for OpenID
• Java, Python, Ruby and .NET APIs (Rails and Django integration for extra points)
• Global deployment with appropriate SLAs
• Deployment pages with a proper branding kit so people can get up and running quickly
• Ability to extract all my users in .csv format or via an API

I would pay for this service in chunks of hundreds to 1000s of users with all the usual discounting policy for prepayment or purchasing in bulk and the first 50 users are free.

One more pain point on the road to release removed.

I don’t want a free one with strings attached (e.g. LiveID) and I don’t want some non-profit consortium (e.g. the Liberty Alliance). I want to pay  for it and own my data.

Basically a Web 2.0 oriented OnDemand business.