Registration up 300% with Facebook’s Registration Tool | Hacker News Reader

Registration up 300% with Facebook’s Registration Tool

marketaire.com

39 pointsbjonathan17 comments

I've tried using it, but I couldn't find any way to validate the data against information on my own servers (ie for unique email address), so it felt like I was giving up some important functionality.

I was impressed with how straightforward it was to get running though.

The documentation says you can do async validation: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/registration/adv...

Darn, now I look like quite the fool :)

I'm going to go ahead and pretend that wasn't there when I was trying it.

But now you can go ahead and use it so it's all good.

To be honest, I still don't like it. But now I'm limited to my aversion to depending on Facebook for making sign up possible.

With something like 1 in 3 North Americans who use Facebook, creating this ease of use can really make the difference between engagement and not.

It's definitely important to put the user first, especially if you're running a business and looking for conversions.

I always try to put the user, I never knowingly put my own agenda ahead of the user's needs.

I'm using the Facebook Login button rather than the registration form (I have a non-facebook registration process too), for a couple of reasons:

1. It's faster for Facebook users. 2. Assuming they actually read it, Facebook Login makes it clear to the user what level of access I'm getting. The Registration Plugin provides no indication what permissions they're handing over - it's more than the default access. The site is given an oauth token, but no indication what this token can do.

I could be completely missing the point of the Registration Plugin of course, but I spent a little while implementing it, then realised that I didn't need any of what it provided and just used the Login button.

Good points. I think the idea of setting up registration for another site on your own site is sort of defeating the purpose. I'm sure everyone browsing the web as heard of Facebook, do they have an account? Likely.

It'll be interesting to see how Twitter progresses as a connecting tool. Obviously Facebook is superior as far as numbers go, but I don't think we'll ever see one agreed upon way to connect users to sites. Facebook just seems to make the most sense at this point.

It would be nice to see some additional social aspects we could use to add to site engagement. Liking and tweeting is one thing, but what about onsite functionality? OneTrueFan is a digital check in - is that what's next?

You should be able to pull the data from their API after registration. You can do the logic checks on that data and present your own HTML form prefilled with the data Facebook sent you if anything needs to be changed.

You can - the data gets POSTed to a URL of your choosing, signed with your secret key.

But I don't like the interruption in flow that I have to force on the user in order to present a second (nearly identical) registration form just because the validation on the first is rubbish - especially for a field as important as email address.

In case you didn't catch it - Facebook just announced this (validation) functionality yesterday.

"For example, FriendFeed beta tested the tool and their sign ups by users with Facebook increased by 300%."

(Emphasis added.)

To be fair, did they know which users had Facebook but didn't sign up with it, or did they assume that only the people with Facebook signed up with it? That wording could mean that traditional sign ups stayed at the same number, while Facebook connects increased by 300%.

It would be nice to introduce a way to pull a user's data from Facebook and display content that's relevant to that user. I know there's the Facebook user activity widget, but I'm talking full displayed content.

Obviously this would be ideal to do on the fly.

Hmm, doesn't seem to be working on chrome 8. For half a second there is empty space where, I guess, the form would show up but it disappears. I tested it on Firefox 3.6 and it works.

Site appears to be completely down at the moment - some sort of database error.

That was before the site went down. The site worked fine, the facebook form, didn't.

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