I probably surf over 200 web pages a day both for my job and for personal reasons. As such, one of my major pet-peeves is having to register on certain websites. I don't mind so much for certain types of sites, such as financial institutions (credit cards, banks), forums (i.e. VoIP Forum, 3000GT forum, Viper forum), so I can get notified for any new posts or replied to my posts. But to have to register to receive news is just plain annoying!
Especially since I can probably find the same or similar news story somewhere else. And even if it is exclusive content, it's just not worth the hassle to register to be able to read one story link.
Many times I have "googled" a particular topic, then see an interesting excerpt on the Google search results, click on the link and then prompted to register to read the story. Grrr! Usually I just go back to google and try a different search result.
But then I found a website called BugMeNot.com. It contained a database of usernames/passwords of popular websites that require registering, such as the NY Times. I could enter in the website and it would give me a username/password to use. It not saved the time and hassle of registering and remembering yet another username/password combo, but it also provided anonymity and helped prevent yet more spam in my Inbox.
Well unfortunately, BugMeNot is no more.
Read about it here: Boing Boing: RIP, bugmenot.com
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I recently discovered this site and was upset that it was down, but it is now back up!
Here is a link to an article about the outage:
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/08/20/bugmenotcom_returns_.html