Dan Murillo

Disappointment with Facebook Connect

First, a bit of context.  Over the last few months I’ve been working on launching a new company in the consumer internet space.  As with most consumer internet companies these days, we’re aiming to throw in some “social features” such as allowing you to communicate with friends that are on the site.  In order to enable these features,we need to know who your friends are, so using Facebook connect is ideal.  Our original plan was to use Facebook connect ONLY.  There’s a tremendous amount of value to this - both in terms of creating a better consumer experience right away and using less dev resources.  

Here is where the problem begins.  Around 30% of our Alpha users REFUSE to connect with Facebook - and these are people that we know and are friends with! Another 30% complain but eventually capitulate.  The remainder are fine with it.  The users are non-techie women between 20-40.  

What is happening here?  After talking to users, I’ve realized that the experience of using Facebook Connect is best described by the chorus of the timeless Metallica song, “Enter Sandman.”  Here’s the appropriate passage:

“Sleep with one eye open

Gripping your pillow tight”

It’s all about FEAR. It’s quite simple.  Users have been taken advantage of so many times by apps and websites that use FB Connect and spam their wall and send unauthorized messages that they are afraid to let anybody else in.  Trust has been broken.  

I was talking to a friend of mine from the SF tech community about this issue and his response was cautious, “all the new consumer internet startups I’m seeing in SF now are basically FB/Twitter connect only and it seems to be working great.”  I chuckled.  I love the idea of SF-based startups using FB/Twitter connect and inviting their other SF-based tech friends to use their apps. I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that the usage habits of the average SF-tech-hipster are unlikely to generalize to the population at large. 

Where does this leave us?  I’ve talked to enough normal users that I’m pessimistic about the ability of Facebook to regain that trust anytime soon.  Can Twitter connect step in here? G+?  Can Facebook release a “super secure” version of Facebook connect that users trust? 

For the time being, I’m sad to say that we rolled out our own registration system and users have been flocking to it en masse. So it goes.