[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.