The PubSub Weblog

Why do we ask for your Email Address?

We recently came under some criticism on Dare Obasanjo's blog for requiring an email address from our users. His point was that a function like search shouldn't require that kind of personal information. Fair enough. What he's missing, though, is that we're not a search service.

When you create a subscription on the PubSub site, we store your request and return results as they happen. Since the susbcription is ongoing, users need a way to cancel their old subscriptions and retrieve a list of their existing subscriptions - and this is what the email address provides.

We use email addresses instead of user accounts. We had a lot of debate internally about whether we should use full accounts (meaning sign up, create password, log in) or just use email addresses to simplify things. We decided to use email addresses for the time being to make the process easier. This means that any time you want to interact with the service - to cancel a subscription, or retrieve your current list of subscriptions - we use email to verify who you are.

What we do is publish-subscribe (that's why we're called PubSub). When you subscribe on our site, we're creating a persistent query for whatever you've requested. From that point on, any time that data comes up - whether it's in a weblog, a newsgroup, an SEC filing, or whatever - we deliver it to your subscription. When you're viewing the results immediately, as in search, you see everything that already exists that matches your query. With us, you see everything that is going to happen - as it happens.

This means that we create an ongoing relationship with our users. When you subscribe, we check every piece of data coming through our system, from that point on, against your subscription. Because of the way our system is built, one subscription doesn't consume a lot of resources. However, we want to limit the number of unused or unwanted subscriptions. Therefore we require that the user "own" the subscription, and be responsible for it. Users can cancel their existing subscriptions or find their old subscriptions using their email adress.

If you want to search for something, there are lots of places you can go. Feedster provides a great blog search; Google searches newsgroups; and you can get EDGAR data straight from the SEC. We don't provide search on our site because it's not what we do - we don't feel we can add anything new to search, so we leave search to other people. It's our publish-subscribe capability that makes us special, so we're focused on that.

We do offer a lot of content you can access without an email address. For example, check out our pages on politics or the NCAA Tournament. You can read these feeds or check out the graphs any time you like, and there's no signup required. But when you create a subscription yourself, and start an ongoing relationship with us, we want you to "own" your subscription, and to do that we need an email address.

Posted by pubsub at March 9, 2004 08:41 AM | TrackBack