Hacker News Reader

Comment by deepkut | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you that FB Connect has tremendous potential, but I disagree with you regarding how negative people view it.

Using FB Connect for Greekdex has (seemed) to be effective. You must consider your audience--Greeks, even at UPenn, are less worried about their "sensitive" data in comparison to a startup that targets techies who are very aware and paranoid about their data.

I wrote about how companies should "stand on the shoulders of Facebook," feel free to read about it here:

http://blog.greekdex.com/post/17396768249/stimulate-the-econ...

EDIT: I made a bold statement out of pride that was relatively unrelated to the discussion.

View on HN

I don't think "number of registrations received when offering only Facebook Connect" is enough data to evaluate the effectiveness of using Facebook Connect as your only login option compared to providing a real login option.

Edit: It looks like your product actually depends explicitly on Facebook data to work, so it wouldn't be possible to not use Facebook. While Facebook Connect is a good choice for a product like that, it is also the only choice.

I agree with you, I'm not trying to make a general statement that is true for everyone. Just trying to point out that FB Connect might not be viewed as negatively in certain markets.

This logic is fallacious.

    > In just a week at UPenn, our startup Greekex has
    > received 500 registrations via Facebook Connect 
    >(we do not offer an alternative login).

500 registrations via Facebook Connect compared to what, exactly?

Any idea of how many didn't sign up after visiting, or backed out?

You have no alternative login so you can't compare it against people opting for those.

How about projected signups? Were your expectations met or exceeded?

All you're saying here is that you've had 500 signups through Facebook. No useful conclusion can be drawn from that.

Ok, in hindsight, I agree that might have been a pointless statement in the grand scheme of things, but 500/3000 Greeks in one week is significant market penetration. This is also a MVP that we developed in 4-5 weeks, so I say that with pride.

And I also apologize if my anecdote came off as a bold general statement that was backed any formal logic or stats. It wasn't, and I didn't mean to make my argument based on that.

Well I guess it matters how important it is for you to get all the users interested in your service or a part of them. Right now there are two categories which you are definitely missing on: 1) People who don't have a Facebook account. 2) People who have one but are more privacy-concerned. How affected you are by these two categories is defined of course by the target audience (demographics and social status for example), but it is pretty hard to draw conclusions without alternate methods of registration (for I know those 500 registrations came from 1000 interested users).

Well, we're convinced that 99.9999% of Greeks have Facebooks. But all I'm trying to say here is that FB Connect might be extremely effective for certain markets, and horrible for others.

You're only looking at one side of the coin. If you look at it from a FB stand point, FB connect is effective whatever the market.

See you can make money in a casino, some games offer better chances than other but in the end it's always the casino who makes the real money.

You may have misinterpreted what I said because I don't quite get what your point. FB connect is not effective for certain markets. Good luck getting cryptologists signing up for your FB Connect website.

This is different than being a complete stranger to an app requesting your Facebook permission since the other students in your school likely knew who you were and where the app was coming from and decided to trust the Facebook auth based on that.

With a user being completely unaware of the app or brand I would say that the bounce percentage is actually very high.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com