This was an exciting find for me, personally while working on the web chat for Hotline. NUS has its own web-authorization mechanism, called webauth very similar to OpenID. While I am unsure of other applications that are currently using this service, I do know that Microsoft Dreamspark makes use of it. Try downloading a software from there and you'll be redirected to this page that verifies that you are indeed an NUS student.

I think it is safe to say that we couldn't find the documentation to use this service very easily on the NUS site. In fact, we couldn't find it at all. So, I had to google a bit and finally managed to get an excellent guide from the Georgia Tech site that uses webauth too!

The implications of this small discovery are immense from the point of view of a developer. Now, we can have applications exclusively for NUS students like the Hotline Chat. Any online competition can now have a university-level ranking system. You are fourth on iTrivia among your Facebook friends but where do you stand among your peers on campus. Imagine the Module Review site employing this to verify student login. This should keep the students from NTU or spammers or both, away!

We are calling this NUS Connect, after Facebook Connect and are currently looking at creating a generic wrapper that makes this button embeddable on any website.