[codinghorror]

The way I read this, it's about the CEO overriding the decision based on aesthetic reasons.

Personally I'd much rather log in with Google in this case, which means there would need to be three buttons: Twitter, Facebook, and Google. I'm sympathetic to the "nascar-ization" argument, but I also believe your customers are smart enough to process at least as many options as there are in their wallet for providing identity.

Perhaps the best solution is even more minimal: no login options at all! Let the browser auto-generate credentials and a unique password on your behalf, then automatically use that to log you in every time it sees that website.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/09/cutting-the-gordian...

[jbigelow76]

I think some distinction should be made in the different types of websites out there. Social logins may be fine for social type sites but Mailchimp is ostensibly more business oriented, except for maybe a niche of bloggers or social media types whose personal/social identities are interchangeable with their professional identities, I think the majority of users out there would want to keep their personal and business credentials separate.

I can understand why the CEO would not want to blur the lines between the professional persona and the social one, after all if in Twitter and Facebook the users are the product and not the customer that could lead me, a Mailchimp customer, wondering how Mailchimp perceives me as well.

[bunderbunder]

> I think the majority of users out there would want to keep their personal and business credentials separate.

Yup. Luckily it's pretty easy to maintain one set of online credentials for business activities and another for personal ones.

[mratzloff]

> The way I read this, it's about the CEO overriding the decision based on aesthetic reasons.

I read this as the CEO overriding the decision based on experience, not aesthetics. Reducing choices reduces errors.

[omni]

This seems unreasonable, since he was presented with evidence that showed a strong correlation between more choices and fewer errors. In hindsight, this turned out to not be a causal relationship, but the CEO had no way of knowing that at the time.

[khet]

If you started making decisions based solely on rational arguments and facts, would those lead to better decisions?

Almost all business are built on intangibles. Emotion, creativity, personality, feelings, loyalty, love etc. These intangibles are extremely difficult to explain yet most decision makers instinctively understand them.

The CEO probably made a decision on instinct. He was not rationally arguing the social integration, he instinctively denied its value. Rationally, you could probably prove the social buttons to be beneficial but you would have to disregard the intangibles.

[anigbrowl]

I too would rather use Google, but via a browser hook of some sort. I don't like all the social/sharing buttons that festoon most websites these days, and use Ghostery to get rid of them. To some extent it's a dislike of being tracked, but mainly it's just too much crap on my screen.