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Comment by yeldarb | Hacker News Reader

As a developer I want to use this to persist and sync data between devices. It provides a unique identifier I can use for the user before they trust my app enough to want to login.

We have found that a significant number of users will just quit the app if presented with a "sign up or login" with Facebook screen at the beginning of the flow.

With this, they don't have to give us any personal data and can start using our app right away. If they want to activate social features later it is really easy to upgrade their token without having to worry about merging accounts.

Edit: regarding the user side, the problem for a lot of users isn't that they don't trust Facebook. It's that they don't trust the random app/website that is asking for their Facebook data.

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"regarding the user side, the problem for a lot of users isn't that they don't trust Facebook. It's that they don't trust the random app/website that is asking for their Facebook data."

Personally I feel it is the other way around.

I guess we'll see how successful this is to see what people really think?

Why not that they don't trust either?

> As a developer I want to use this to persist and sync data between devices. It provides a unique identifier I can use for the user before they trust my app enough to want to login.

Email address, allowing me to use '+' as a mailbox extension. I'll use wtbob+yeldarbsite@example.net. Done.

> We have found that a significant number of users will just quit the app if presented with a "sign up or login" with Facebook screen at the beginning of the flow.

Yup. I refuse to log in with Facebook anywhere but…Facebook.

> With this, they don't have to give us any personal data and can start using our app right away.

I'd still be using Facebook to log in, so no thanks.

> regarding the user side, the problem for a lot of users isn't that they don't trust Facebook.

I don't. In fact, I trust your website with my per-website email a lot more than I do Facebook.

Okay, but how do I prevent spammers from signing up with randomly generated email addresses?

Ok, now you are being honest about it. This is a real problem, and I don't know the answer to that either. There must be better ways than making Facebook the toil taker of the web.

If it makes anything better, I'm one of those people that run away once you ask to log-in with Facebook, and that change won't make me start using it.

I'm guessing that Facebook can put far more resources into random-email-spam-account mitigation than any one company using Facebook Login. You'd face this same problem rolling your own auth/login system.

>We have found that a significant number of users will just quit the app if presented with a "sign up or login" with Facebook screen at the beginning of the flow.

thats me 90% of the time.

Ditto – it's similar to the push notification / run in the background prompts on first run, where I have nothing invested in the app and don't even know if I’ll use it.

I like this because it allows the developer to solve things like unique sync accounts and only ask me for more info after I've liked the app enough to want to do something like share it.

I remember the days when people signed up to things and then my Wall and theirs was filled with requests and updates and blah blah blah.

In a humorous way, this post illustrates that old problem well: http://thebloggess.com/2009/08/get-my-husband-off-facebook/

Even though that's not a problem today, I'm still skeptical of apps because of it. So I'll log in with Google+ or another service, but Facebook still makes me feel gross from those old experiences.

As a user, I immediately quit apps that present a login with Facebook screen because, like 29% of users, I do not use Facebook.

I don't trust Facebook or the random app/website asking for my data.

I'd rather not be someone's product.

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