61–70 of 109 posts
Someone please tell this to Spotify. It's a little infuriating that for the last three months or so you may not be a member of their service unless you have an active Facebook account.
Of course, I would love to see some actual numbers on whether it was worth it for Spotify (I suspect it was), but my point is that's a bit of a special case.
The reason people pick Facebook only is because they think that losing users that don't use Facebook is better than having to implement your own account system. Authorization and account management is really easy to screw up. If you leave it to Facebook, you'll save a lot of time. The only question is whether or not it's worth it.
Surely there's a way to avoid implementing your own account system that doesn't drag in the massive unrelated architecture of a Facebook, Google, or Twitter. You don't even need SSO like OpenID. Is there a company that just sells a no-frills user enrollment and login service and also provides strict isolation between sites? (I.e., they resist the temptation to leverage their aggregate user base.)
I haven't got an account and I certainly have no intention of getting one ever.
Why would anyone design a site to use an FB only sign-in? Jeez ...
Twitter vs. Facebook as the only options. It's as if OpenID never existed. Which, sadly, may be nearly true.
As much as I love Khan Academy, I hate, that they only offer Facebook and Google as sign-in options. I try to avoid both of them as much as possible.
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Given that there are ~ 300M americans and facebook has ~850M users, my guess is that most of their userbase is overseas (and oftentimes falling prey to the whole "americans use it, so I should also be using it" mentality)
For a long time Facebook wasn't available over seas. Facebook started with only US colleges, then high schools. It only opened up to people outside the US about 3 years ago I think so I would assume a large percentage of its user base is american.
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Unless your product is something that builds on Twitter's platform, I wouldn't recommend it. It means your users don't have a choice about how they're authenticated to your site, and A) Failwhale, anyone? B) Twitter doesn't provide serious options for protecting their users' login credentials. It's the same username/password combo which is easily phished & replayable. Sadly, I've pretty much given up on the hope that…
From a dev's point of view I really feel that OpenID/OAuth is absolutely not worth the headache. I'd rather just go the hacker news model. Choose a strong password and if you forget it, we send a new one to your email address. Works fine, offloads a lot of security issues to email providers (who tend to be good at it), easy to code.
Personally, I like the Joel test for abstraction/outsourcing. Identify your core competency, then go one layer below it in the stack. That's how deep you should go in-house. I think for many sites/apps, user accounts fall within this realm. That doesn't mean you can't interoperate, but don't be solely dependent on FB.