[Excuse the muck if you saw this post before -- and if you're on RSS. I just burned a couple of brain cells trying to get decent info up here and it was shite. This should be better.]

I cannot, for the life of me, understand how Inklings does its login. If you sign up by going through our markets, you will need to sign up for each one. AND you'll have to sign up to trade on the other public markets. I've made tons of fake accounts now, and I can't sign up through either of the two markets we have and then get the login to work for other public markets. Same with going in the other direction.

If you're interested in trading even fake money in other markets, use InTrade since they have a decent play money section.

MORE UPDATES: I'm a big baby. The site is decent, and does a service by enabling people to make their own markets fast. But it still frustrated the crap outta me.

So, it turns out Adam Siegel, the founder of Inkling, is, like, a decent guy, and didn't rise to the bait of my snark and provided some useful info via email. I'll pass on the bulk of his suggestion:

There's no need to open up new marketplaces for each market. Consolidating it all under one page (i.e. inklingmarket.mint400.net or something) is probably the best way to go about things so that users can access them through one ID. Second, the OpenID tool is available for people if they want to use one ID across multiple sites.

A couple of notes, from my email back (I don't pretend to think the guy has enough time to keep checking the Mint):

1) Ok, I get that having one site makes sense. But as a group blog it's not all that convenient to coordinate all ideas for posts through one person. That this ended up on Inklings was a whim of mine; this shouldn't tie another contributor to the blog to using my ID and login, or even to create new parts of the site. But this, of course, is the push-pull of one site's ease versus another's (it's easier for Inklings if we just consolidate).

2) One of the big issues with prediction markets in general is that the insights they provide are degraded if the market is too "thin", that is, if not enough people trade. Which means we want as many people trading as we can get. I opened these up to the public because the few people I could allow access to through email would be paltry compared to what is really needed. Major roadblocks in moving from market to market means a lot of people ditching from frustration, thus thinning out markets for everyone.

3) After a couple of years in the website biz, I can claim some insight on user issues. The lack of a good standard for third-party sign in systems (e.g. TypeKey, OpenID...) still means that I have to maintain multiple IDs and passwords (or, in a move that makes the security freak in me twitch, use the same ID and password for everything). Sure, you have to sign up for an account through Inkling, but I don't think a lot of people come to it with an OpenID. So they can either accept the usability of Inkling, or go sign up for yet another account, perhaps just so they can trade across multiple markets. This splits the users attention and adds a weird layer of interaction that some people might find off-putting.

Anyway, like I said, Adam provided feedback and insight to some random guy on a blog. We here at the Mint have a pretty strong policy of not only pointing out when something pisses us off, but also recognizing real stand-up acts. Thanks, Adam.