

Ask HN: Facebook authentication -- Yes or no. - blhack

I'm building my next project right now, and I have to admit that the ease of letting users click a single link to login (not needing to register) is <i>very</i> temping.<p>With it comes their identity, their profile picture, their existing network etc.<p>Does anybody have experience with this?  How did it work out for you?  I saw a couple of threads from a little over a year ago:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502061<p>but am curious if opinions have changed.
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makeee
On my image sharing site I have a prominent facebook login option and only
about 1/10 users use it to login, the rest create an account normally. I'd
recommend having both options. Of course, users may be less inclined to login
with facebook on a site like mine, where they are sharing content that they
may want to keep separate from their facebook identity.

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sblom
I've tried it before on a previous project of mine, and the results were
pretty bad. Many users walked away because it wasn't obvious why we needed
access to any of their Facebook information--we weren't asking for any
permissions until much later in the relationship, but users still balked.

There weren't any great ways to notify a user and it was unnecessarily hard to
allow users to interact with people for whom they new an email address but
weren't friends on Facebook.

I think your best bet is to encourage users to create an account on your
site/app directly (perhaps with a Facebook/Google option), and then later link
it to Facebook once they understand the benefit to them of doing so.

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thesash
It's easy to implement, removes friction if you're developing a social app.
However, you become reliant on facebook, search around and you'll find stories
about developers having apps banned, etc. Also, if your app is _not_ social,
and there is no clear reason to integrate with facebook, users may be hesitant
to use it.

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alpb
Inspect foursquare. They have Facebook login but it is not mandatory. Not
everybody uses Facebook, besides this brings independence to your platform
rather than relying on some 3rd party (FB, in this case) system, e.g. when
Facebook goes down, you are down.

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staunch
Works fine, just make sure you give people an email sign up option as well.

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digamber_kamat
Look at how Quora does it. It is the best way to do it.

