A growing number of clients have been asking us about Facebook Connect and if or how they should integrate this new service from Facebook with their existing websites.
Facebook Connect is essentially a single sign-on service that allows users to login into your online community using their Facebook username and password. The benefits are obvious:
- User can securely log into your site without the need for registration or authentication
- Quick and simple "One-click login" process
- Your site has access to a user's Facebook friend list
- Your site has the ability to post information back to a Facebook user's news feed
- New users can find other Facebook friends using your site very easily
- Your site has access to other Facebook platform features
The notion of single sign-on is not a new one. The idea of allowing consumers to enter one name and password in order to access multiple sites (an idea that has also existed in the enterprise for quite some time) has been around since the launch of Microsoft Passport (now Windows Live ID). Since then numerous single sign-on services has sprung up promising universal registration and login for all.
Single Sign On Options
The growing number of single sign-on services that promise to eliminate or reduce the need for new users to registration include:
- Facebook Connect: Provides one-click login using your Facebook login, access to friends, news feeds and other features of the Facebook platform.
- OpenID: An open, decentralized user identification standard that supports single sign-on and "portable identities"
- Google Friends Connect: Provides access do user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
More than Just Single Sign On
Before deciding on which single sign-on solution to integrate with your online community consider the rest of the package being offering. ReadWriteWeb makes a great point in saying:
This battle isn't about "single sign-on" - it's about the payload that comes with it (friend networks, personal data, maybe more), it's about the developer communities, usability and ownership.
Single Sign-On Best Practices
Given the growth in social networks, adding single sign-on capabilities to your online community makes good sense, as a means of acquiring "customers" and improving customer retention. Here are some things to be mindful of when making the single sign-on decision:
- Supporting multiple single sign-on services may complicate your offering and pose integration difficulties and possibly confuse new or existing users
- Offerings from Facebook and Google bring additional features and functionality that set them appear from open source solutions such as OpenID
- Understand your user base and select the single sign-on service that most closely matches your current or target market
- Be sure to leverage the communication link established with third-party sites such as Facebook and Google when integrating their single sign-on solutions
- Understand your offering's "customer ownership" model and decide if you want to build a community with "borrowed users"
- Avoid "sloppy" integrations that are technically faulty or don't leverage an offering's features and functionality