Boycott the Button (Why I Refuse to Click on Facebook Connect)

It’s getting a little scary. I’m at the point where I would rather spend 5 minutes filling out a new profile than log into a third party site using Facebook Connect. Don’t get me wrong, Facebook Connect is a great tool (for Facebook) and I appreciate the gesture of interoperability, but I can’t help but see it as the single greatest threat to the future of the social web.

First, here’s what Facebook connect does well: If I were to click on the button, I would find it incredibly easy to share profile data with any site on the web; I would find it incredibly easy to send my activities back to Facebook where all my friends could take a look; and when I return to that site, I would be so happy to learn that I don’t have to remember yet another user name and password. And therein lies the problem…

Facebook does these things so well that publishers might not feel the need to integrate their sites with other social networks. They will be tempted to conclude that they’ve found the one-size-fits-all easy mac solution to that whole “social media” thing.

For many publishers this reasoning makes sense. With Facebook nearing 400 million members, it’s likely that any existing users of the site already have Facebook accounts. Why force them to create a new profile for the site? Users win because they don’t have to spend time creating an entirely new profile and re-connecting with all of their friends. Publishers win because any friction in the sign-up process is reduced to a mere click.

I believe that in the long run, everyone loses.

When a user logs into a site with Facebook Connect, that user’s activity is shared with Facebook and Facebook alone. This will be enough for some people. But what if I want to share my activity with LinkedIn? What if I want to share my activity with Ning? What if I want to share my activity with an innovative startup that is just beginning to build it’s user base? What if I want to represent a different side of my online personality to the site I’m visiting? Two possible answers: 1) The publisher takes the time and resources to develop an additional ‘Connection’ for each and every additional social service, or 2) I can’t.

#1 is inefficient, #2 is anticompetitive. Both alternatives are bad for users, bad for business, and bad for future of the social web.

The barriers to entry for the small innovative startup will be nearly insurmountable in a world where every site is content with Facebook’s ease of use. Joe the job seeker who wants to engage with other readers of a career advice blog will be forced to represent himself as Joe of Facebook instead of Joe of LinkedIn (when we’re at work, do we act as we do among friends and family? See this post for more). Simply put, Facebook Connect is a lock-in play.

My guess is that the right product will match Facebook’s ease of use but provide ‘plug and play’ functionality so that sites can easily integrate multiple social web services (yes, like OpenID).

Let’s not pretend that all the innovation in the social space has happened. Instead, let’s make room for the next generation of Zuckerbergs.

Boycott the Button.