We're thinking about adding it to our web app to reduce registration barrier, but it is going to be a bit of work to integrate into our account system, which will mean delaying other features.<p>For those who have implemented FC, has it helped convert a lot more of your site visitors, and has it helped growth a lot through the mini-feed messages of your users?<p>Any feedback or stats would be great..
The general impression so far seems to be that FC doesn't so much net you new users as it does increase engagement among current ones (if integrated well). That isn't surprising given what I've seen running my Facebook app (which is now at about 50k MAU after 2 months) and what I've seen of sites using FC.<p>Facebook Platform (and presumably Connect) is great for virality, but haphazardly slapping it onto something that wasn't designed for its strengths and weaknesses from the beginning nets you little. To use it properly, you have to design your app or site from the ground up around the platform. Otherwise you're wasting your time.<p>I haven't looked into connect much yet, but I'm guessing that if it allows for solid virality (invites, notifications, profile boxes, mini feed entries, etc.) people just haven't quite built the app that takes advantage of it yet. They're just adding it onto their blogs and social news sites and hoping, and unsurprisingly they're not getting much in return. Look through the portfolios of contractors who build Facebook apps and you'll see a lot of that. Some newspaper thinks they can just stick sports scores in a Facebook app and it will go viral. Those apps always have 12 active users.<p>So I guess my advice would be don't do it half-baked, or you won't get much from it. If you're going to integrate it, rework your entire product to use the viral hooks you get from it. It doesn't seem to be that much easier for a user than a streamlined signup process anyway.
I just finished an FC implementation on a site I'm working on. The site still has local accounts, but users can now connect their local accounts to their facebook account Facebook or just login through Facebook (which actually creates a local account).<p>Beware: integrating with FC turned out to be a surprisingly large undertaking, although lots of that effort was spent a) trying to assemble an understanding from the FC docs about how the thing actually works and b) figuring out how to handle all of the weird cases (and the common cases, for that matter).<p>The FC developer docs are not all that coherent. The wiki seems to cover most of what you'd need to know, but lots of the information is on pages only linked to from obscure other pages, and there's not a good big-picture technical explanation. Even worse, much of the wiki is locked down so you can't fix it.<p>And there are a bunch of special cases to handle.. what if a user is logged into a facebook-linked local account on your site but is logged in as the wrong facebook user? Or what if they're logged into a facebook-connected local account and not logged into facebook? If you make a mistake, Facebook doesn't usually provide a helpful error message, and their javascript is all compressed, so it's a pain to try to use firebug.<p>If anybody's interested, my site's at <a href="http://mushpot.net" rel="nofollow">http://mushpot.net</a>. If anybody's got questions about the implementation, feel free to post them on mushpot and I'll try to respond.
Very theoretical responses - I suppose Yeti had those thoughts before he posted. I think he is looking for something like "Yesss, our signup rate went up 50%" or "Nope, not really a difference".
You should know this by using mathematics. Do the following:<p>1. What age range is your primary consumer?<p>2. What country is your primary consumer?<p>3. What is the intersection between facebook users and the two questions above?<p>4. Based on whatever statistics you can find - how many users get turned away because of sign-up problems?<p>5. How many consumers will your initial marketing push reach - i.e, the consumers you hope to gain in the period when you don't have hard feature choices to make?<p>Intersect those 5 criteria and estimate what the benefit of facebook connect will be. You may want to contrast it with the benefits of the other features. Understand your numbers before spending time on stuff.
just make users want to register and then make registration really really easy - allow them to trial your service before registering, allow them to register without having to verify their email.
One of my projects use it (<a href="http://eatmycharts.com" rel="nofollow">http://eatmycharts.com</a>).. I'd say it removed the registration barrier, but that's about it. People will come back for the service.<p>I can't track which users publish to their mini feed (is there a way to tell? you ask the user's permission and there's no javascript callback to know if the user approved on publishing). Most of my users that are in my facebook network prefer not to publish to their mini feed.<p>I myself don't like to use my Facebook account on other websites (unless I really want to use my identity on purpose). That's why on my website, I automatically assign a nick to the user (which they can change), so their full name won't appear on public.<p>Overall, I don't think FC helped a lot in my case.
most people I know don't use it. Top 3 reasons seem to be:<p>a) Fear of giving away the login info to third party sites
b) Privacy concerns, with every account on the internet being linked to them
c) Too used to quickly register with BS info(name: AA), so they don't feel like they should bother with FC<p>Actually if I think about it...I don't think I've ever heard anyone praise Facebook Connect.