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Comment by danmaz74 | Hacker News Reader

Try to see this from a developer's perspective. If Facebook becomes the de facto standard for internet authentication and the de facto standard platform for every service, developers' freedom will be much diminished. And there are many developers (and entrepreneurs) here.

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Do you have some examples of how companies have differentiated on authentication that led to their success? For each of those how many have failed due to lost time trying to build an authentication system or due to a breach caused by building one with a flaw in it?

Authentication might seem a trivial matter, but it isn't. If you use facebook connect, your users are actually facebook's users. Facebook knows how many times they used your service, when, and so on. And, most importantly of all, you are locked in into facebook's service.

What if one day FB starts to push more and more FB connect applications to become FB apps? How much leverage would they have?

As a counter example, I use google analytics on my websites. This means that google knows everything about my stats. But if I stop trusting them, for any reason, it would take just 5 minutes to change. This doesn't give any leverage on me. Contrast this to using FB connect - or the google equivalent, for that matter.

That's what makes many independent developers scared of this kind of news... that being assimilated by FB could one day become inevitable.

At least Google is an OpenID provider, so you can provide Google, Yahoo, etc. buttons that are actually OpenID buttons, and then have a general OpenID field, and let your users choose.

What about some examples where requiring authentication led to measurable market success at all?

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