Like many online communities, my employer is considering integrating Facebook Connect.
Wikipedia defines Facebook Connect as:
A single sign-on service that competes with OpenID, the service enables Facebook users to login to affiliated sites using their Facebook account and share information from such sites with their Facebook friends.
We see the primary appeal of implementing Facebook Connect as:
Reducing the Registration Hurdle
While anyone can browse ratings and reviews on RateItAll, only registered users can post content. The simpler our registration process, the more review content gets posted. The more review content that gets posted, the more new visitors we attract, and the more advertising and affiliate revenue we earn. Simply put, reducing the barriers tosignup is mission critical for our company.
Currently our registration process consists of:
- User Name
- Password
- Email address
This is about as simple as you can go without abandoning signup altogether.
Facebook connect reduces registration to two clicks; 1) clicking the Facebook Logo; and 2) confirming that you want to associate your Facebook account with the host site
As an added bonus, Facebook Connect will pull in the user's profile photo, which is a surprisingly big deal for community sites.
To try logging into a third party site with your Facebook credentials, check out this test site.
Promotion on Facebook
Anyone who has built (or considered building) a Facebook app knows that the primary incentive to do so was the promise of injecting your brand / content into a very active, very viral community. If things went well, interconnected networks ofFacebook friends might spread your stuff to millions of new users (though it was unclear if an app user was a "real" user ). In recent months, it has seemed that for all but a few companies, the Facebook platform has offered diminishing returns. A redesign has relegated applications to a separate tab, and spammy apps have caused Facebook to restrict the site's viral channels. Finally, frequent changes to the platform itself meant that just keeping your app up required a lot of handholding.
Facebook Connect offers the same promise of viral growth, but without a few of the headaches of the FB platform. With Facebook Connect, third party sites can push stories into participating members' news feeds. Unlike Facebook apps which drive traffic to your app's Facebook canvas pages, Facebook Connect drives traffic from Facebook, directly to your site.
In theory, Facebook Connect allows you to enjoy the distribution power of Facebook without the platform headaches of maintaining, distributing, and monetizing a parallel app.
Helping New Users Find Friends on Your Service
Any community that uses a newsfeed / follower format knows that connecting new users to friends is a huge challenge. If a new user has no friends on a service, theirnewsfeed is likely to be empty. An empty newsfeed is not a good user experience.
In addition to reducing the registration hurdle, Facebook Connect allows your service to connect new users to their friends by checking to see if any of their Facebook friends are already on your service. The Facebook Connect example site provides a good instance of this - in my case, it found 12 of my Facebook friends that were already on the service.
So let's review - on most newsfeed sites today the new user flow looks like this:
1) user registers with email, password, user name, with possible email confirmation; 2) user is prompted to use an unsecure friend lookup by giving away their email credentials or to search friends by user name; 3) user is prompted to confirm friend status.
With a site using Facebook connect, this whole process of signing up and finding friends can be reduced to two clicks.
The Cons
The obvious downside of going all in with Facebook Connect is that you cede the registration information of some percentage of your new users to a third party, for profit company. If your users' email addresses do not reside in your database, you lose the ability to send your users things like alerts, activity updates, and newsletters. This can adversely impact your site's community ifFacebook Connect users can not be alerted when other users do things like send them a message, or write on their wall. To some extent, you risk creating two classes of users of your site.
It is, however, possible to implement parts of Facebook Connect, but not others. For example, a site might choose to implement the push / distribution aspect of publishing stories viaFacebook Connect, while still requiring their own proprietary login.
Additionally, unlike Google Friend Connect and MySpaceID, Facebook Connect is not built with open standards. Says data portability advocate Chris Saad:
Essentially, Facebook is trying to replace all logins with their own, and control the creation, distribution and application of the social graph using their proprietary platform.
To some extent, sites that use Facebook Connect are protected against future Facebook shenanigans by virtue of the service being hosted on their domains. To use a ridiculous example, let's say Facebook is acquired by Microsoft and Microsoft begins charging your new users $1 to sign up to your site using Facebook Connect. In this scenario, it would be no big thing for the third party site to just rip out Facebook Connect from their site. Facebook Connect is a complementary registration system - it does not need to replace your existing registration, and there doesn't seem to be any implied dependence onFacebook for continued operation of your site.
Conclusion
By easing registration requirements, offering increased distribution, and solving for what to do with a new user with no friends, Facebook has come up with three very compelling arguments for online communities to take Facebook Connect for a spin. The distribution piece in particular is brilliant - it makes Facebook both a Federator by distributing its registration system AND an Aggregator, by pulling in Internet wide activity into a central newsfeed. It's also classic hub & spoke strategy. Facebook is telling us site owners that they will trade us traffic for distribution of their registration system. For all of Google's might, their lack of a central newsfeed limits the ability for Google Friend Connect to drive you traffic.
I know for many people, the fact that Facebook Connect doesn't use open standards is a big problem. Idealogically, I don't really care as long as our site's users are not adversely impacted, and we are able to grow our business in the most efficient manner possible. And because there doesn't seem to be any ongoing dependence built into usingFacebook Connect, it doesn't seem like an irreversible decision.
Resources:
How to Add FB Connect to Your Blog
ReadWriteWeb on promise and risks of Facebook Connect
