Ask HN: Facebook Connect bad for business? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Facebook Connect bad for business?

3 pointsthatusertwo4 comments

So Dave Winer has been talking about data silos, here is a link http://scripting.com/stories/2011/01/04/whatIMeanByTheOpenWeb.html

Question: If we use Facebook Connect for our service and for some reason Facebook revokes our API key we will be screwed. Our users data will be locked away and our users will no long be able to log onto our service and keep the data they had before. This seems like an overly high price to pay for an increase in accessibility. Thoughts?

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I've previously built Facebook applications. I've had Facebook turn off my applications with no warning. It sucks. They've done this to us on a Friday evening and then headed home, so we've had our business shutdown until Monday or Tuesday when they got back to us and turned us back on.

If I was building my own web site outside of Facebook, I would not give them the power to shut me down. By all means, allow a user to link their accounts to their Facebook accounts, but you must own your own user.

Also, get the security right here - spend the 2 days to work out how to store passwords (note: don't store passwords!) correctly so that when your user database is stolen, your users aren't completely screwed.

Thanks for the feed back.

Also, as a generic facebook user, I feel increasingly queasy when I see some app I signed up to use is posting all my activity on that app on my facebook page. Not welcome. Yes, I can control the publishing right for the app on my facebook page but usually I find myself tend to remove the app entirely. It's getting prevalent to use facebook connect as login for a new business, but personally I doubt if this practice is viable and applauded by the user.

If you are using Facebook connect simply to authenticate users,I don't think its worth the risk.You should build your own system for this. If you are doing something more involved and more useful to the facebook user, the risk might be worth it.

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