Hacker News Reader

Comment by gabaix | Hacker News Reader

Every time I Facebook Connect to an app, I check my profile that nothing was posted. Even if Facebook does say if the app will post on my wall or not, I am just confused on what is going to happen next.

It is one of those things that prevent me from signing up at all.

View on HN

This is why it's a very good idea to include the line, "We will never publish anything to your timeline without your direct permission", on your sign-up form. Or even more direct, "We promise not to post to Facebook that you signed up with us!".

Something along those lines will go a long way in getting me to use Facebook Connect to register for your application, because like you, I immediately go check... and I'm infuriated when they do.

You're right about the line. But, as an anecdote, pinterest have a very similar line and I found a bunch of "xxx has begun to following yyy" (or something like that) after the "automagic auto-follow all my friends". I discovered the "feature" of the posting only because someone answered to my post... Now I'm way less confident on the promises made on login...

Yep, this happened to me as well. There seems to be some confusion, which no one is addressing because they want the virility, around the initial "User signed up for Product! Try it out!", and then future pushes based on user interactions or automagic sharing.

You have to remember too, that we are the minority, and most users (especially of services like Pinterest, which people absolutely love) don't really care about this stuff, or think it's normal.

Pinterest seems to have take a page from Spotify and WaPo with their "sure you can turn wall notes off...if you ever realize that we're doing it" approach. Easier to ask forgiveness and all that.

We tried this and found the response to it very minimal. It's probably better than nothing but I wouldn't expect it to do wonders.

>"We will never publish anything to your timeline without your direct permission "

I tried (a variant of this) for a client and it boosted conversion rate by 10%. Huge.

You just convinced me to remove the 'social discovery' option (the developer option that posts whether or not a user is using your application to the timeline) from my Facebook Application.

Nice! Really though, good call.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com