

Facebook Login and What We Learned from our Show HN - njoglekar
http://neiljoglekar.com/fb-login-and-what-we-learned-from-our-show-hn/

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vampirechicken
If you want a service that hacker news readers will use to find new friends,
then listen to their advice about logins. If you want lay people to use it,
Facebook login is clearly the way to go, which you'll learn once you start
talking to people (e.g. soccer moms) who don't operate inside hacker/internet
engineering echo chamber.

~~~
njoglekar
We are hoping to give people the best of both worlds, get started and opt-in
to FB login.

~~~
vampirechicken
Clearly, you'll want local login, and then integration to as many services as
you can stand: fb, twitter, google, etc. There are some pretty robust
solutions that are almost drop-ins that do this kind of thing for you.

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sergiotapia
Your feedback sample is HN; of _course_ these guys are going to dislike
signing in with Facebook.

Fact is, for normal people (think: your mom, aunt betty, cousin Joe) Facebook
login is easier and looks safer to them.

It circles back to the ancient proverb: Know your audience.

~~~
timcederman
Not true. All the metrics I've ever seen for Facebook Connect usage are
abysmal regardless of audience.

~~~
untog
I worked on a project that had incredibly positive results using Facebook
Connect. So I guess we're at one anecdotal data point on each side.

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devcpp
I don't know about the others, but the reason I didn't comment was precisely
because I didn't want to log in using Facebook. Your giant trees were blocking
my view of the forest.

Giving the choice between a third-party and a classic profile is the best way
to go. It complicates things a bit but no one has a reason not to try your
service out.

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calinet6
Lesson #1: _Hacker News is not your audience!_

Just forget about the nerds with a megaphone up their collective butts yelling
about the evil Facebook and go for your actual market: _everyone else._

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elithrar
I've considered GitHub and Bitbucket logins to be great options if you have a
product that targets developers, but want to try and avoid (for a while, or
forever) handling usernames/passwords/password resets/etc yourself. Both seem
to have a general sense of "trust" that many do not have for Facebook.

I'm implementing Google & GitHub (w/ BitBucket to follow just after) OAuth2
flows on a small project I'm building now. Both services are extremely
pervasive amongst the specific developers I'm targeting, so I consider users
unwilling to sign-in with either of those services a minority (but one that I
won't ignore, if they clamour for it!). I just had to draw the line in the
sand somewhere if I'm going to get this out the door this summer (winter,
here).

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stephengillie
What does this say about HN -- that commenters here would rather troll and
complain about FB login than to talk about the value behind a new social
service?

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zalzane
I have no idea how criticisms over only allowing logins to a service through
facebook could ever possibly be construed as trolling.

~~~
stephengillie
Because it's an easy argument to bait others into, but doesn't solve anything.
Offensive nerd sniping is another way to look at it.

~~~
corresation
"Bait" someone, "troll"ing....to observe that demanding a Facebook login might
not work for everyone?

Give me a break. Save the outrage for a case where it might be appropriate,
however thus far the only troll here is you.

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pmiller2
You might want to check out combosaurus.com . It's by the same people who run
OkCupid and quite interesting. They are also quite good at predicting things I
like based on the things I've already told it I like. What they don't have is
a focus on actually meeting people.

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mey
Very nice writeup of the original thread and lessons to learn. Also I commend
you for listening, learning and improving. I am not in your current markets
but I'll be watching for when you expand to other areas.

~~~
njoglekar
Thanks for the kind words, hopefully we have helped improve our feedback
channels even more and can expand to your area soon.

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X-Cubed
> "The email people used to sign up for Facebook was not one that they checked
> every day (which is especially important if that’s how you want to schedule
> events)."

That doesn't strike me as an issue that's unique to using Facebook Login.
There are plenty of people that don't check their email on a daily basis.

~~~
njoglekar
Good point, what I meant was people use emails that they never check period.

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furyofantares
I don't think you can really get a feel for the site without signing up for
it. I wonder if you'd have gotten better feedback from HN if people could
actually use it without signing up. This is probably a different issue
entirely than relying solely on Facebook Login.

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teh_klev
Not sure why you want to restrict your audience to the SF area. I can
understand if you're shipping a product or delivering a physical service, but
this is just people matching.

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priyadarshy
these are some valuable insights regarding something people default to without
considering the tradeoffs.

I'd be interested to see a more in-depth analysis across products/companies
and wider demographics regarding the disparity between an inferred personality
(via likes) and actual preferences.

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fakeer
I don't know whether it's a mistake or not but I see a lot of new
location/locality/city specific apps/startups coming out as _only in city A,B_
or maybe _works only in the USA_. Though I'm sure majority of HNers are north
Americans, most of these starups/services could actually open up to the world.

What happens is you see an app and from the outside it seems promising, you go
inside and it's like "oh, great! USA only" or maybe "SF only" etc. One
solution would be to just put a banner on home page "ABC only as of now" or
whatever.

