Account Strategies on New Social Enabled Sites

Question

So I'm in the midst of creating a Facebook Connect enabled site. The site in question will leverage your social graph - as defined by your facebook account - to do social things (what is really not important here). Here's the big question I have:

Are people still rolling their own authentication heuristic when using something like Facebook Connect? That is, are newer (FBConnect) sites today providing only FBConnect as an authentication strategy, or are they pairing it with other auth strategies (such as Google Auth, Open ID, etc)? What do you think is the best way to go? With Facebook having over 300,000,000 users now, is having 1 authentication strategy (FBConnect) enough? Or is it proper netiquette to provide users other means?

Answer 1

There are still people who use mySpace (myself not included), and I know a several people coming out of college that have completely deleted their FB accounts to get rid of information of them they don't want potential employers to find (I know, there are a lot easier ways of doing this). If there are people who for whatever reason do not want to have a FB account, at least give them the option of creating a private google account.

Answer 2

The Problem is somewhere else

if you really want to leverage the social graph only facebook brings "pure" data

the graphs people build at e.g. myspace arent telling much about that person and its social env. - at google neither

if you are just heading for viral spreading prefer the plattforms that share the best (just facebook again)

Answer 3

Some of the references I have been looking at today:

http://www.kenburbary.com/2009/08/five-reasons-companies-should-be-integrating-social-media-with-facebook-connect/

Increased Registration - Data from Facebook states that sites that use Facebook Conect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-300% increase in registration on their sites. • Citysearch.com – Daily site registrations have tripled in the 4 months since Facebook Connect testing began • Huffingtonpost.com – Since integrating with Facebook Connect, more than 33% of their new commentor registrations come through Facebook • Cbsinsider.com – Over 85% of all new user registrations are coming from Facebook Connect

http://www.simtechnologies.net/facebook-connect-integration.php

"according to the current statistics using facebook connect increases 30-40% user traffic as compared to non-facebook connect websites."

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Connect/Authentication%5Fand%5FAuthorization

Our research has shown that sites that implement Facebook Connect see user registration rates increase by 30 - 200%.

No Need to Create Separate Accounts In general, it's not a good practice to force a new user to create a separate account when registering on your site with Facebook Connect. You'll have the user's Facebook account information, and can create a unique identifier on your system for that user. Just make sure you understand what Facebook user data you can store, or simply cache for 24 hours. See Storable Information for details.

If the user ever deactivates his or her Facebook account, you have a chance to contact the user to request the user create a new account on your site. When a user deactivates his or her account, we ping your account reclamation URL to notify you of the deactivation. Then Facebook sends the user an email regarding the deactivation. If the user has connected accounts with any Facebook Connect sites, and if your site has specified an account reclamation URL, the email will contain a section with your application logo, name, and reclamation link, in addition to an explanation about the link's purpose. For more information, see Reclaiming Accounts.

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/how-facebook-connect-points-the-way-towards-velvet-rope-networks/

The Drawbacks Though there are advantages to using Facebook Connect for integration, there are some drawbacks, mostly from the marketer’s point of view. If you build out a social network project using Facebook Connect, Facebook gets all the information and you get none. You don’t get a database of users. You don’t get a way to message people participating in your event, except for “in stream,” the way everyone else is using the app. You don’t have any sense of demographics, nor any control abilities to block trolls or other unwanted types.

Crystal Beasley "All of the FB Connect sites we have built so far have incorporated "standard" accounts as well, even with the added complexity of supporting dual login methods."

Answer 4

Using ONLY Facebook as the register/login-method seems pretty dangerous to me. If you had a regular user management system, with Facebook Connect to speed up the process from a user-perspective is a good idea.