Recently I wrote about the importance of Facebook Connect and how it will change the internet forever. Over the last month I’ve noticed more and more sites and online services implementing Facebook Connect and OpenID to their logins and site registrations. If you don’t know what these are, they basically allow users to login to your site using their Facebook, Google or Twitter accounts to name a few. By reducing the number of logins a user needs it solves one of the biggest usability issues the internet has had since it began: registration fatigue and forgetful memories.
A couple of recent big examples include Digg and Microsoft’s Xbox console using Facebook Connect to integrate user data into their services. It’s actually very simple to do, in my spare time I’ve been tinkering with it on my new blog, LoveClapham, and the API makes it all very straightforward for a developer to zip in and work their magic. Digg is one of the simplest yet best examples I’ve seen because it allows you to login to Digg in two steps using your Facebook account and then every time you Digg a webpage you can share it in your Facebook feed. This is a sensible and non-spammy method of promoting content within Facebook.
The benefits? Users hate registering every time they want to use a different site, this removes that hurdle increasing interaction and UGC. Users also tend to forget their logins if they don’t use a site very often, password reminders are ‘ok’ but they aren’t ‘good’ usability, this removes that problem too because people only have to remember one login. Then of course you have the benefits of promotion within the social networks. The negatives? You will be releasing certain amounts of data about your audience to organisations like Facebook and losing out on the ownership of those users, but you can still save additional demographic data and with the benefits it brings, Facebook Connect and OpenID are impossible to ignore.
It’s pretty obvious to me that by the end of the year the vast majority of websites will already have Facebook Connect integrated and the sites that haven’t yet added it will begin to suffer as the wave of users making use of it will be even less forgiving of additional logins. I’m sure most media owners will already be investigating this new technology so I won’t harp on any more about using it, but if you’ve seen some good examples, please share them in the below comments.
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Interesting article Jack, and very timely as we're just having a conversation around 3 of our own internal systems that require separate login details. However, I think there can be a down side to all this, based around identity theft and one which also has parallels to PIN numbers.
You are right to identify that the modern world contains a lot of passwords and PINs for the human brain to remember, and that can sometimes be problematic. So as lazy humans, what do we do, create them all the same. This opens us up to a significant problem if the details of our 'one' login/PIN is discovered, and I just wonder if there is a similar problem here. At least different and multiple login details are ring fenced from each other minimizing the potential risks.
Hey Simon, very good point - identity theft is definitely an issue with this and any technology that requires a login/password that can be stolen. It's going to be about getting the right balance because, to continue with your analogy, internet registrations at the moment is like going into a shop and then using a different card and pin number in each one. It would be safer to do this, but it would also become difficult to manage. Hopefully (and I'm sure they are) developers are already investigating new methods of security.
For instance, imagine if your Facebook login followed a similar process as your online banking login - the most secure logins on the internet at the moment. It's long winded but with Facebook Connect you login once per session. At work for instance, if I choose to I can login in the morning and remain logged into all sites I have activated my Facebook account with all day.
So yes, some way to go but hopefully we'll get there sooner rather than later.
How much does this make you prone to data mining, hacking, and misuse?
Jack Wallington
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Member since: 03 Jun 2008
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