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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is related to Android or Google Apps for Business more than any particular customer (dis)-satisfaction with Facebook.

I know that I have been leaning on the Google+ login a lot more now than before, because it integrates so well with my Android phone.

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For me, I see Facebook as an application. It's a social network, just one thing of many I use.

Google, on the other hand, is a platform. It's Gmail and YouTube and Maps and G+ and the Play Store and Drive and a whole bunch of other things. Not just a single app, but a family of apps that share a common identity. I don't see my Google account as just credentials for an app; I see it as a common login for a whole ton of different apps. In particular, I'm used to the paradigm of "use my Google account to pull my identity and my data down to my Android device", and I don't see any problem in extending that paradigm to apps that aren't made by Google.

Immediately thought of this the Steve Yegge rant from a while back - https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

He argued Facebook is more a platform than Google is - apparently because its easier for developers to build inside of Facebook's platform than Googles.

Huh, he seems to focus pretty heavily on G+ API, which was probably pretty bad when he posted this in 2011. Any idea if it's gotten better?

> Huh, he seems to focus pretty heavily on G+ API, which was probably pretty bad when he posted this in 2011.

The repost of this (I don't know how close it was to the original sharing) was about a month after Google first released the initial, extremely limited G+ API -- and only four months after Google introduced G+. (Google had already rolled out another set of APIs at the time of that repost.)

> Any idea if it's gotten better?

G+ in specific has a much more robust API than it did at the time (unsurprisingly, given how new it was then), and more significantly Google in general has really developed very much in a way that seems to be in the direction Yegge was calling for in the essay.

As a user, I actually prefer Google's Oauth login precisely for lack of the underlying platform.

It lets the site confirm that I'm the Gmail account I say I am, and if I accidentally give it publishing permissions, it can shit all over my Google+ profile without anybody impacted. Giving a Facebook app publishing permission is a bigger hassle, so Facebook logins carry more cognitive load.

My sample-size-of-a-few take is that it's a combination of factors:

1) The probability that a Facebook users at somepoint has had a bad experience with rogue Facebook app publishing personal information (or even an accidental acceptance) or was witness to a friend's experience is non-trivial

2) The increasing awareness of the scope and scale of personal data that is taken from logins and shared with advertisers

3) The demographic shift in Facebook usage to older users

4) The large secular increase in awareness of ongoing privacy and financial information breaches that rightly or wrongly is associated with over-sharing of personal information

Seeing a friend post embarrassing spam or porn is a horror inducing visceral experience. It wakes people up to the fact that Facebook's business is fundamentally unseemly.

Exactly - given an average of 500+ friends and years of being active daily or weekly for a large chunk of that time, the probability that you've at least witnessed an embarrassing incident is many orders of magnitude greater than just having done it yourself.

I really believe there's a high level of wariness among the general FB user population that no amount of marketing or changes in authorization policy can fix. It's a level of trust that's irretrievable.

In my case, I simply don't use Facebook or Google Auth for site logins simply because I can't be bothered to work out how the data might get used, what the tracking implications are, whether things would suddenly show up on my Facebook feed etc.

Faced with the choice of trying to understand that lot, or typing my e-mail and password in, I'll go for the latter. I surely can't be the only one.

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