[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.