These days, everybody has so many accounts at various web services. This is a known fact. Look at FriendFeed. One of it’s purposes is so people can view the online activity of their friends in one place. That means that you don’t have to go to all those separate websites to catch up on what your friends are doing.

But that’s not the only change. Before, people really liked it when all you had to do was sign up for a free account to use a service. Now, that’s not the case. Signing up for an account, keeping track of the username and password, logging in from time to time, and all that work just seems like too much when you have to do it for so many web services.

So now, there are many web services that you can use without signing in. I’ll use FriendFeed as an example here. There have been a couple blog posts that talk about how to get the most out of FriendFeed without signing up for an account.

An example is typing the below string into your URL.

http://friendfeed.com/public?service=blog

What it does is show you what all the FriendFeed users are blogging about. With URL tricks like this, you can get quite a bit of functionality without logging in.

Another example. My dad has recently discovered Digg. He doesn’t have an account, because he doesn’t need one to read interesting news. He is able to use a service without logging in.

What does this all mean? It means that new services have to come up with ways for users to try out their service without having to sign up. Of course, it’s impossible in some cases, like for webmail services (Gmail). If the ONLY way to use your service is to register an account, your service is at a disadvantage.

So, what is the latest in using services without having to sign up? Well, there is Posterous. You can start a blog without actually having to register an account. You use your email account, a service that you already signed up for, to make your first post to your blog. You are then give a reply email that asks if you want to get a password. Getting a password allows more functionality, like the ability to choose your own subdomain name, instead of having an automatically generated one.

So, what is in the future of web services and accounts? I think we will just have to wait and see.