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Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

The "Phantom Profile" Fred Wilson talks about is a great concept.

I particularly like Stack Overflow as an example here. You can visit Stack Overflow and ask a question, all without having to create a profile. You are given a name, given a profile, and given most of what a regular user gets.

As soon as you do decide to sign up "for real", your temporary profile is turned into a real profile. The biggest difference being that you're not cookie-based (you can log in to the profile from other machines).

Despite Jeff Atwood complaining loudly about how so many users have stayed cookie-based for so long, Stack Overflow has gone to great lengths to make sure their site is completely usable with a minimum of hassle, which makes it a much better site in my eyes.

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I definitely get the impression that Jeff is more surprised than upset by users who have used cookie-based accounts for long periods. If I recall correctly, the record for longest "active unregistered account" is around 2 and 1/2 year (Stack Overflow is just shy of 3 years old, for comparison). That's a loooong time to go without clicking a Google/Facebook/Whatever button.

Of course, not having to register is completely by design and almost certainly never going to change, it's such an obvious win from a user experience point of view.

Disclaimer: Stack Exchange employee.

"it's such an obvious win from a user experience point of view."

And yet so few implement this.

By the way, I think it only really became obvious, to me at least, when StackOverflow implemented that design.

stack does a bunch of things i think are smart. we've learned a lot working with them

They have a strong ethic and they stick to it, and it very much comes through in setting the tone of their sites. It's so sad to see so many other companies compromise when you get such a great RoI on little investments. Most sites have shopping carts that expire after a couple of minutes. Amazon's shopping cart lasts effectively forever though. The result is a better user experience at a modest cost of engineering and database resources. It's the polite and correct thing to do, and for amazon it probably results in a just slightly higher rate of sales, not to mention better customer retention, etc.

Ultimately the best companies are those who are passionate about their users and willing to go to considerable efforts to do things which have no other goal but making users happy.

Yes, the last time I bought in Amazon was more than 10 years ago but I use Amazon as a wish list repository for Books and Music.

Out of curiosity, where do you buy books from?

I live outside US and since a decade ago books from Amazon arrives on one of the mail building (except using FedEx). So, I was not buying tech books lastly, only literature in closer bookstores.

Amazon's user accounts have some strange behavior. I have managed to get myself 2 accounts with the same email and different passwords. There is no way to merge these together!

This is the only site I've used where the username doesn't have to be unique!

There's a reason for this. Amazon started before the widespread availability of free email services and it was quite common for a family to share a single email address from their ISP. They built this feature in to allow for this case.

I knew an engineer who interned at Amazon who's responsibility was to maintain this legacy system as there were still quite a number of active accounts that shared the same email address.

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