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Comment by ckubal | Hacker News Reader

hey Phil,

Sorry to hear that Facebook Connect is a non-starter for you -- FWIW, we only use FB to to make adding friends easier; otherwise, people would have to manually enter email addresses, or select Twitter follows (which tends to be a less complete superset of one's real-world social graph). We never post to you or your friends' walls or anything annoying like that.

We're looking for ways to develop a solution that would both allow people to use it without a Facebook account but also seamlessly add friends, and trying to figure out if that's possible. Appreciate your feedback, and sorry that you weren't able to use the app.

-charlie founder, chronos

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Stupid question from someone that closed the site after noticing a lack of 'for iOS' in the title (in other words:I'm not the target, no iOS device):

Can't you add email addresses to your iPhone contacts? Would it be impossible to pick friends from the phone's contacts (maybe filtered to entries with mail address) instead of from a scary big Farmville provider?

Definitely a fair question; you could add email addresses from iPhone contacts, but then we'd have to deal with things like

-name fragmenting (e.g. in my phone, I have 'Dad', you have 'tommy', and someone else has 'tom from bowling'). Facebook provides a consistent ID matched with an email, a first name, and a last name.

-number fragmenting (one person has my work phone, one person has my cell, one person has my home -- we don't want these to be three separate accounts)

-usually, no pictures for any users (and again, fragmentation of pictures in rare instances when you do have a picture for a user).

Facebook is an easy way to quickly get first and last name, photo, and social graph -- there are certainly some limitations, but to make the experience as seamless as we could for the user, we thought building it on Facebook Connect initially made the most sense. That said, there are people who would rather just have a new account on chronos, so we're exploring the possibility of allowing people to create one with an email and pw.

I'd like to second that Facebook is a non-starter for me. You should provide an alternative that doesnt connect to facebook, twitter etc unless you want to.

Thanks for the feedback, and sorry to hear -- our goal in connecting to Facebook is to make it easier to add friends (so you can see how you spend time with people IRL). We could allow for adding via email+pw, but then we run into the problems I outlined above, and having friends on the service would be much more difficult.

I've had apps where I've been hesitant to connect with Facebook, but it's when I'm concerned the app will post to my wall or my friends' walls without my consent -- given that we don't do this, what is it about connecting to Facebook that turns you off? Is it a concern that Facebook would have access to the information in the app (they don't) or something else?

Thanks for the post -- trying to best understand so we can develop the best solution.

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