Facebook is the only account that I keep to myself and people who know me. My Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Github and all the other stuff I can't remember, all exist to connect me to people I've never met. I'd way rather use one of those than Facebook.
I don't understand how people even get it into their heads to immediately ask potential users for direct access to my private information?
Seriously, would anyone approach potential clients with that kind of attitude in real life?
"Hand over your wallet with your ID and the pictures of your kids and loved ones, your diary and your address book, or else you can't shop here."
Please, f* off.
Either it's private to you, in which case this service is very likely not going to provide you a great deal of value, which puts you outside their market, or it isn't private, in which case you're in their market.
>Seriously, would anyone approach potential clients with that kind of attitude in real life?
This is real life. I don't like the implication that "it's an internet service" means "it isn't real life." This is a service that's trying to land you with real people, doing real things, in a personal way.
The attitude here is "you're looking to be social, so sign up with your social network." If you don't like that, then I'd warrant that you aren't the type of person this is aimed at.
It'd be nice to have alternatives -- others here have suggested a survey, for example -- but let's be honest: Facebook collates a lot of really useful information that is directly helpful to a service such as this. It's a no-brainer from their point of view.
Why does this service's value depend on Facebook? I use Facebook to communicate with a few friends and family. I don't list my interests on Facebook.
> which puts you outside their market
Then they're unnecessarily making their market smaller. Unless they don't have the time or skill to implement an interest questionnaire, this doesn't seem like a good decision.
Are you trolling, or can you not control your arguments?
I don't think you can classify this as "using it wrong".
It seems obvious that if I or a user like me were to use this service it wouldn't work very well, and would potentially devalue the service for other users (through poor matches).
The developer of the service is artificially limiting their market by only allowing Facebook Connect and they may have problems getting the necessary critical mass for the service to be useful as a result. I don't think it's trolling to make this observation.
When you create a product like this, every decision you make "artificially limits" your market. But often these decisions open up other parts of the market that would be inaccessible otherwise. For example, the time they would have spent on building alternative login options for people like you would probably be better spent adding features for the people who have no problem using Facebook connect, and who list their interests on Facebook.
Facebook was sold to users as a way to connect and communicate with my friends and family. This is how I use it. I don't use it as a tool to pass my personal information in bulk to marketers.
In any case, Facebook has many features. Listing interests is just one of those features (and a peripheral one at that, which many of my friends don't bother with either). If people don't use every feature of a product, they're using it wrong? According to who?
Judging from the comments, there are many others who also feel that forcing users to login via Facebook is undesirable. For those people, it creates unnecessary friction. For me, it was enough that I'm not going to bother spending more time with their product.
> ... then don't get mad when their solution doesn't work for you. Are you trolling, or can you not control your arguments?
I'm certainly not mad. The truth is, they're here pitching their service to me, not the other way around. I took a look, offered a suggestion, and that's that.
A growing number of social networking services promote OAuth logins to the dominant social networks (Facebook, Twitter etc.) as the primary authentication method, over "traditional" email confirmation type processes. Users of such practices include Klout, Kred, Foursquare, and others. The permissions granted typically permit the authorized application to download the entire social data stream belonging to the user, which is stored for data-mining purposes by the application provider. By facilitating such use, OAuth is acting as a component in a social engineering type scam where users of the application probably do not realize the extent of the data they are sharing.
I can understand that you don't agree with the developer's choice to use Facebook connect. But this sort of response isn't productive to the conversation.
Is it really that black & white? I'd imagine there are tradeoffs between product usefulness and the imposing nature of Facebook connect. Shouldn't we talk about how to prioritize these tradeoffs?
> Please, f* off.
Please support productive discourse on HN and avoid comments like this in the future.
> Is it really that black & white? ...
It is a bit troublesome if the only way to try out a new service is to give you access to Facebook data (which likely includes a whole lot of data that is unnecessary for your service); it is asking for a whole lot of trust and my threshold for trying out services that require it is a lot higher than normal.
Of course it may be that many startups actively do not want people unwilling to provide FB data to try out/use their services. In that case we are in total agreement ;)
Right on! Using FB to login to various sites (mainly, commenting for in house or third party systems) has become de facto standard. Though some people will right away see the obvious problem with this approach, majority do not care, and will happily post with their FB profile.
It's a low hanging fruit, and with more than enough willing to give up their privacy, it's good enough for the echo system.
I am happily seating out of it though.
However, in your haste to patronizingly chastise me you're making multiple faulty assumptions.
a) I'm not new to HN. Just this account is.
b)"Please, f... off" was descriptive reflection of the way I would respond to the fictional analogous request which you have so conveniently omitted from this quote.
It was in no way intended to address the developer, but rather as a way to illustrate how I feel developers who use access to my personal information as the entry fee to their product treat me.
I think most people here got that.
I think it's a great idea to use Facebook to connect with other people. So this developer can see my interests and friends and posts....so what? So can all of my friends, and a lot of other people.
Privacy, since when have we had that? Your neighbors can freely watch your comings and goings, see who visits you and usually know what you're doing. Why aren't you more afraid of them?
Since we've had costs to stalk people. Walls, for example, add a reasonably high cost to see and ear what we're doing. We can be reasonably confident that people in general won't care enough to pay the costs of violating our privacy if they're reasonably high.
Your neighbors can freely watch your comings and goings, see who visits you and usually know what you're doing. Why aren't you more afraid of them?
Because the costs are reasonably high and the "profit" is reasonably low. Most of my neighbors can't afford to stay all day looking at the door to see who comes in or out, nor do they profit financially from doing so, unlike these online services.
Why are you assuming, or at least implying, that people who wish you wouldn't exert such an aggressive attitude, really just don't understand you and are stupid?
Before someone says that my comment isn't helping the conversation, there's this great site that you can order popcorn from... . ... ...
So how to do this with some horizon? Maybe it needs to be an open API that many social network sites implement/agree on. [ but one that allows me to share or not share my social graph orthogonally to using a sign-in user handle ]
Complaining about "Facebook connect" doesn't make any sense. What makes sense is complaining when app developers ask for permission to access data they don't need, or they ask for access and abuse it in ways they didn't disclose to the user.
So yeah, I get you.
To the "lets be amigos" people: stop it please. I might think you had a good idea, had you not followed a path so closely associated with the scum of the internet.
I'm also willing to bet money that, faced with actually filling out a survey, many people otherwise reluctant to sign in with FB will just do it.
1. identity + likes / interests 2. filling out activities as a backup in case they don't have interests on FB
It's too bad since I was at first really excited about the idea of Let's Be Amigos, as it purports to solve a problem I've been having lately, but immediately my attitude did a 180. Facebook is not going to be a good resource to mine interests for people that don't have one.
Outside of our world, signup with Facebook would probably convert a lot more and even improve engagement. It's a worthy tradeoff IMO. Atleast to a business owner.
Lastly, for now wanted to dodge anonymous signups. Won't be much fun to set you up with people that are not real. Hope you give it a shot.
You will get more signups if you offer alternatives, vs. trying to convince people you won't abuse the FB privileges. Just something to consider.
You can sign up for free. Almost immediately, you start to get emails, instant messages, flirts, matches, etc. You can see some info from the profiles of the people supposedly trying to make contact with you, but you can't see what they're saying or provide any kind of response unless you subscribe. If you do subscribe, more often than not you'll discover that all of that contact activity was from fake accounts that never respond to anything you send them. By that point the site already has your payment, so it's too late to do anything but cancel before the next automated payment occurs.
I'm not saying your site works like this; I hope it doesn't. I'm just saying that this kind of thing is why users of a site like yours would be concerned about fake accounts on the site.
Being able to trust strangers is nice, but not needing to is even better.
Oftentimes you can deny the post ability. You can't tell until you arrive at the screen, but if you don't click okay, nobody's posting anything on your wall.
That's the real problem here: Facebook has a history of wanting to expose as much personal information as possible, including exposing information that was previously not exposed without warning. I don't necessarily distrust the OP's business today, nor do I necessarily disagree with the permission settings I can set today. What I don't trust is Facebook's future changes to those permission settings, nor what the OP's business is going to do when/if it has more access to my information than it used to have.
If Facebook had a history of strong privacy protection and strict opt-in policy to information sharing, this wouldn't be so bad. But since Facebook has the completely opposite history, including Zuck coming right out and saying that he would prefer all Facebook user info to be shared, I'm not going to trust Facebook to keep whatever I want private private.
Sorry, but even if I were willing to sign up via Facebook, I wouldn't do it just so that you can pretend that you're making sure that only real people are signing up.
I really don't understand the Facebook deepthroating trend. But feel free to ignore the advice that have been repeated here times and times again.
https://www.facebook.com/browse/friends_using_app/?app_id=14...
Oh, I forgot! I DO have a fake one that I use for development. I guess I can just use that...
Well, the only way I would log in with facebook is with a freshly created "anonymous" fb account for this purpose only.
How about supporting https://login.persona.org/ ?
http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platfor...
That Facebook is "for people who know you" means it's exactly where Let's Be Amigos can find other local, friendly second degree links. Twitter, LinkedIn, etc, with generally global and/or impersonal links, aren't as good source material for the stated goal.
I do not use Facebook. I won't sign into a service with Facebook.
For professional work, I'd far rather use Github as my auth provider. :-)
Especially when I can just type in a few tags which signal my interests really well and enable sifting for like-minded people.
eg. "Frisbee bike Newark hacking" or "maker bots liberal coffee valley" or "photography walking s&m boston" :]