[onemorepassword]

I did exactly this, almost instantly, and the next first thing I saw because of that was this comment...

I don't understand how people even get it into their heads to immediately ask potential users for direct access to my private information?

Seriously, would anyone approach potential clients with that kind of attitude in real life?

"Hand over your wallet with your ID and the pictures of your kids and loved ones, your diary and your address book, or else you can't shop here."

Please, f* off.

[teej]

I see you're new to Hacker News.

I can understand that you don't agree with the developer's choice to use Facebook connect. But this sort of response isn't productive to the conversation.

Is it really that black & white? I'd imagine there are tradeoffs between product usefulness and the imposing nature of Facebook connect. Shouldn't we talk about how to prioritize these tradeoffs?

> Please, f* off.

Please support productive discourse on HN and avoid comments like this in the future.

[onemorepassword]

I see you're new to the internets. Sorry, that was cheap.

However, in your haste to patronizingly chastise me you're making multiple faulty assumptions.

a) I'm not new to HN. Just this account is.

b)"Please, f... off" was descriptive reflection of the way I would respond to the fictional analogous request which you have so conveniently omitted from this quote.

It was in no way intended to address the developer, but rather as a way to illustrate how I feel developers who use access to my personal information as the entry fee to their product treat me.

I think most people here got that.

[ludston]

> I think most people here got that.

Why are you assuming, or at least implying, that people who wish you wouldn't exert such an aggressive attitude, really just don't understand you and are stupid?

[palidanx]

For Facebook Connect, I think what developers think and the general public thinks are sometimes two different things. If you think about Pinterest, their initial success imo was forcing Facebook connects so the social graphs automatically posts everytime something happens. Perhaps controversial, but effective.

[stephengillie]

So you're not angry at that particular developer, that person, but you're angry that people such as this person think it's a good idea?

I think it's a great idea to use Facebook to connect with other people. So this developer can see my interests and friends and posts....so what? So can all of my friends, and a lot of other people.

Privacy, since when have we had that? Your neighbors can freely watch your comings and goings, see who visits you and usually know what you're doing. Why aren't you more afraid of them?

[icebraining]

Privacy, since when have we had that?

Since we've had costs to stalk people. Walls, for example, add a reasonably high cost to see and ear what we're doing. We can be reasonably confident that people in general won't care enough to pay the costs of violating our privacy if they're reasonably high.

Your neighbors can freely watch your comings and goings, see who visits you and usually know what you're doing. Why aren't you more afraid of them?

Because the costs are reasonably high and the "profit" is reasonably low. Most of my neighbors can't afford to stay all day looking at the door to see who comes in or out, nor do they profit financially from doing so, unlike these online services.

[OnyeaboAduba]

Lost in all this arguing about whether a startup using facebook connect is a good idea or not noone is talking about the actually project you know the whole point of the post. I bet the author got real exicted to see 100+ comments not knowing most of them are talking about something that he/she probably thought was a no brainer for a social website

[icebraining]

Well, then the author learned a valuable lesson about jumping to conclusions.

[joepet]

turned off instantly when saw that need to sign up w facebool

[joshmn]

Getting popcorn.

Before someone says that my comment isn't helping the conversation, there's this great site that you can order popcorn from... . ... ...

[shadowfox]

Not the OP and I sort of agree with you on the language front.

> Is it really that black & white? ...

It is a bit troublesome if the only way to try out a new service is to give you access to Facebook data (which likely includes a whole lot of data that is unnecessary for your service); it is asking for a whole lot of trust and my threshold for trying out services that require it is a lot higher than normal.

Of course it may be that many startups actively do not want people unwilling to provide FB data to try out/use their services. In that case we are in total agreement ;)

[dirkgently]

> Of course it may be that many startups actively do not want people unwilling to provide FB data to try out/use their services.

Right on! Using FB to login to various sites (mainly, commenting for in house or third party systems) has become de facto standard. Though some people will right away see the obvious problem with this approach, majority do not care, and will happily post with their FB profile.

It's a low hanging fruit, and with more than enough willing to give up their privacy, it's good enough for the echo system.

I am happily seating out of it though.

[victorology]

I agree with this statement. I'm creating a product right now which connects you to people who are friends of your friends. Since we need to have your friend graph, we currently require Facebook connect. We'd like to do without this and will look for ways in the future to do so. For now, Facebook connect is crucial to our product.

[gridmaths]

I dont think facebook will last that long.. and then theres linkedin which I think is also a large blip.

So how to do this with some horizon? Maybe it needs to be an open API that many social network sites implement/agree on. [ but one that allows me to share or not share my social graph orthogonally to using a sign-in user handle ]

[rubinelli]

What happens every time this is proposed is that the largest networks never join, since the last thing they want is to hand their best competitive advantage over to the competition. And then the project dies.

[thinkloop]

I think the bigger problem is maintaining the data. The advantage Facebook has is that your profile is always kept up-to-date implicitly by the act of you using it. You "like" something because you want your friends to see it, you add and remove friends because you want or don't want to communicate with them. The side-effect is that your data is actively maintained and therefore relevant to share. A dedicated identity provider that doesn't have avenues for continuous interaction will quickly render your profile stale, except for the most resolute users who are willing to manually duplicate all their interactions from all other social networks.

[toki5]

>I don't understand how people even get it into their heads to immediately ask potential users for direct access to my private information?

Either it's private to you, in which case this service is very likely not going to provide you a great deal of value, which puts you outside their market, or it isn't private, in which case you're in their market.

>Seriously, would anyone approach potential clients with that kind of attitude in real life?

This is real life. I don't like the implication that "it's an internet service" means "it isn't real life." This is a service that's trying to land you with real people, doing real things, in a personal way.

The attitude here is "you're looking to be social, so sign up with your social network." If you don't like that, then I'd warrant that you aren't the type of person this is aimed at.

It'd be nice to have alternatives -- others here have suggested a survey, for example -- but let's be honest: Facebook collates a lot of really useful information that is directly helpful to a service such as this. It's a no-brainer from their point of view.

[freyr]

> it's private to you, in which case this service is very likely not going to provide you a great deal of value

Why does this service's value depend on Facebook? I use Facebook to communicate with a few friends and family. I don't list my interests on Facebook.

> which puts you outside their market

Then they're unnecessarily making their market smaller. Unless they don't have the time or skill to implement an interest questionnaire, this doesn't seem like a good decision.

[stephengillie]

If you're going to intentionally avoid using the tools the way others do, then don't get mad when their solution doesn't work for you.

Are you trolling, or can you not control your arguments?

[visural]

I don't list my interests on my facebook profile, nor do a great many of the people on my friends list. For some that is because they don't want facebook having this information, for others, they simple can't be bothered entering it.

I don't think you can classify this as "using it wrong".

It seems obvious that if I or a user like me were to use this service it wouldn't work very well, and would potentially devalue the service for other users (through poor matches).

The developer of the service is artificially limiting their market by only allowing Facebook Connect and they may have problems getting the necessary critical mass for the service to be useful as a result. I don't think it's trolling to make this observation.

[gfodor]

You (and your friends) are in the stark minority. I worked on a product that drove product recommendations using Facebook interests. It worked great. People list their interests on Facebook because they want to personalize their profile page and share their interests with their friends.

When you create a product like this, every decision you make "artificially limits" your market. But often these decisions open up other parts of the market that would be inaccessible otherwise. For example, the time they would have spent on building alternative login options for people like you would probably be better spent adding features for the people who have no problem using Facebook connect, and who list their interests on Facebook.

[freyr]

> If you're going to intentionally avoid using the tools the way others do ...

Facebook was sold to users as a way to connect and communicate with my friends and family. This is how I use it. I don't use it as a tool to pass my personal information in bulk to marketers.

In any case, Facebook has many features. Listing interests is just one of those features (and a peripheral one at that, which many of my friends don't bother with either). If people don't use every feature of a product, they're using it wrong? According to who?

Judging from the comments, there are many others who also feel that forcing users to login via Facebook is undesirable. For those people, it creates unnecessary friction. For me, it was enough that I'm not going to bother spending more time with their product.

> ... then don't get mad when their solution doesn't work for you. Are you trolling, or can you not control your arguments?

I'm certainly not mad. The truth is, they're here pitching their service to me, not the other way around. I took a look, offered a suggestion, and that's that.

[freyr]

Further, consider this excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAuth:

A growing number of social networking services promote OAuth logins to the dominant social networks (Facebook, Twitter etc.) as the primary authentication method, over "traditional" email confirmation type processes. Users of such practices include Klout, Kred, Foursquare, and others. The permissions granted typically permit the authorized application to download the entire social data stream belonging to the user, which is stored for data-mining purposes by the application provider. By facilitating such use, OAuth is acting as a component in a social engineering type scam where users of the application probably do not realize the extent of the data they are sharing.

[gfodor]

Hey, guess what, you actually can control what permissions you ask for. And Facebook tells you what permissions the developer asks for. And this app does not ask for anything other than your public profile, friends list, email address, interests, and likes. In other words, exactly what it needs to accomplish its goal, and the same data you would need to manually fill in if it didn't use Facebook connect.

Complaining about "Facebook connect" doesn't make any sense. What makes sense is complaining when app developers ask for permission to access data they don't need, or they ask for access and abuse it in ways they didn't disclose to the user.