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Comment by ratcliffco | Hacker News Reader

I avoid FB connect - sites/services I try don't need to be linked to my identity on Facebook, that's just too private, sorry.

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Seconded. I think the move towards not having a new login at every site is a good one, but FB connect doesn't seem like the way to go. I'd like to see something like OpenID, but at the very least there should (always!) be a simple userid or email option.

Or maybe you're just an outlier who (a) understands how Facebook Connect works (b) actually cares. Does anyone have hard numbers on Social (FB/Twitter/...) signup vs. old-fashioned signup. In other words: as a site owner, why should I go through the trouble of setting up my own user management when I can get that for free by integrating FB Connect?

As a site owner you should probably have both. FB connect isn't "free": implementing integration probably takes more time than installing authentication plugin for Rails (and doesn't Django have built-in user management?)

But I think you should have Facebookless login if you care about early adopters: too many of them are indeed "outliers" you've identified above. I also think you should have facebookless option simply because it's good for the Internet: I wouldn't want to see so much of it being controlled by a handful of large corps.

As a real data point, the founder of Quora estimated losing 25% of his sign ups when it was a facebook connect only service[1].

[1] http://www.quora.com/How-much-is-Facebook-Connect-limiting-Q...

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