Lets Talk about Facebook Connect
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In an attempt not to derail the “1.1 Feature Poll” thread, I thought i’d cut and paste my comments from there into a new thread. Alot of people have been talking up Facebook Connect, but without actually saying what the benefit would actually be. So lets talk it out, so that people on both sides of the arguement, and those in the middle can make a balanced and reasoned deduction.
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I’m going to be using quotes from the lovely from the following threads:
http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/login-using-facebook-connect
http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/11-feature-poll
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“in this day and age people hate having to register a new user name and password for every single site”
I’m not in anyway meaning this in a disparaging way, but this is nonsense. Its the opposite. With email access alot easier now than 10 years ago, with email spam filters improved, with multiple-tabs per browser, with “the average user” used to having to sign into different websites – users are FAR more likely and used to signing up for services than they used to be.
There is a myth that techinical people, who are by far the largest percentage of forum users, project onto the average user; that the average user wants ultra dumbed-down-simplicity and a one-stop-shop coupled with also crazy interaction features.
Its a myth thats been doing the rounds since Flash 4 popped up, or when Flash 5 went really big, or when dHTML became popular or when AJAX became big etc. etc. And yet somehow, these new “omg my users NEED that kk” features all seem to be not quite as needed as we were told after a little while.
“Like it or not, FB is the big social-networking dog out there”
Agreed, totally; and i do like Facebook. But you miss my points mentioned here: http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/11-feature-poll#post-61894.
1) Nothing stays top dog forever. If we were having this discussion 2 years ago we would have been talking about MySpace, before that possibly MSN messenger signings, and defintely before that AoL signing. No-one has made a point about why we should develop something into the core of BBpress that is dependant on the popularity and propriety software of another company.
And lets not forget Facebook has only become the No.1 Social Networking site i the US this past year. MySpace was recieving more pageviews according to Alexa until Feb/March of this year. Maybe lets see if this lasts first? (who remembers AoL?)
Okurt, for example, while is run by google (yet not popular in the western world) is the second biggest social network. What if google pushes that so that it becomes No1. Should we then forget about Facebook Connect because its no longer No1 and demand a GoogleFriend plugin?
2) Facebook is popular only with a certain demographic. I’ve included links to the stats on my previous post, but the sheer percentage of people on facebook that are White, 15-25, High School Educated or higher, and from the Western World (mostly USA and Canada) is staggering. As it stands, creating a Facebook Connect plugin would (statistically) really only benefit White people from North America who had finished High School. Why should that be something that BBpress includes in its core?
“I think all our bbPress sites would see more interactions if FB connect could be used (optionally turned on or off)”
Awesome, what data are you basing this on?
3) If your focussing on the needs of your end user, then surely content should be king. If someone feels strong enough to take part in your discussion then not being able to log in from Facebook probably wont be an issue.
4) Lets say you offered Facebook Connect. The user clicked it, opened a popup that said “please type in your facebook username and password” – how many do you think would automatically do that? We’re constantly reminded to not give out usernames and passwords, and to look out for phishing websites etc etc. So if a user go to a website or forum, and wants to get involved in the conversation, but not enough to sign up, how likely is it that they’ll use FBconnect instead? Can you back this up with data from other forums or is it just anacdotal?
5) The service itself has been woefully rolled out by Facebook. Here’s a quote from Mark Z
“We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.”
That was in February this year, and in that time, they’ve changed the API twice without telling any of the end users. Can you imagine, seriously, BBpress building something into its core that relied on another companies API not changing inbetween BBpress releases? We’d have to release a new version of BBpress everytime Facebook made a change to its API that broke the previous version – which btw, we’ve had 4 such incidents of this year!
6) Beacon. Not sure you know about this, but Beacon collected data from non-facebook websites you went to or linked to or signed into via FBconnect, sent the info to facebook so they could sell the info to advertisers. Yes, while you see the positives of a single sign in, its been used as a Big Brother spyware, or rather was, right up until the class action lawsuit that Facebook lost only 3 months ago – paying out 21million dollars. Orwellian doesn’t begin to cover it.
7) Facebook Connect != New users.
Lets scrap annacdotal Evidence and go with a real live website with stats availible on the internet.
Gizmondo, one of the founding partners of Facebook Connect almost 18 months ago has seen a steady increase of people using Facebook connect, At the start of December it found that circa.21000 page views were through FBconnect – thats just under double what that number was in March of this year. On its own, thats a big number, but the thing is, its roughly 0.6% of page views for the site.
http://statistics.allfacebook.com/applications/single/-/44615671688/
As popular an idea as FBconnect is, it’s still not that popular in reality. FBconnect gets loaded 50million times a month, a high number (almost 1.5% of facebooks monthly login); but this 50million actually includes every time a page loads with the FBconnect Javascript file, and doesn’t account in anyway for how often its actually used. It is *not* 50million logins with FBconnect a month!
http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/fbconnect.png
If we take Gizmondo as the average (for this example) – which its not, its slightly above average, in that it has technical people and early adopters using its site in a higher percentage, so these numbers should favour FBconnect.
Gizmondo gets roughly 3million page views a month with 700,000 unique visitors. Thats an average of 4.3 page views per person. Now FBconnect counted for 21000 page views at 4.3 pages per person equates to 4884 unique visitors that use FBconnect on one of the partner sites in which its had 18 months to promote the brand linking. Thats a massive uptake of FBconnect on a partner site – of tech savvy people no less – of… drumroll please… 0.7% (not a shock to anyone as i mentioned the figure above).
Do we really, really, think that this is something vital to having people competantly use a BBpress forum?
If 0.7% of your community on your website want to use FBconnect, how many actual people is that?
To put it in context, for every 1000 people that actually post on your forum, 7 will use FBconnect. Thats not 7 new posters, that 7 posters total. We’ve no idea how many of them are new.
So lets take it a step further, what percentage of that 0.7% are users who would not have created an account and signed in if it wasn’t for FBconnect? What if half of those 0.7% aren’t new users, what if half are people who prefer to use one sign-in. Will an increase in traffic of 0.35% really be worth all the time and hassle involved in getting BBpress (which cant even integrate with WordPress – its parent companies flagship product) to integrate with moving target badly run by another company?
Before you advocaate Facebook Connect, ask yourself these questions:
1) What sort of increase in numbers or percentage of posters would make this worth while to me?
2) Am sure that this is the best option for a global product, given that Facebook’s poularity is localised?
3) Am i suggesting a Feature that I myself want?
4) Does BBpress need this feature to actually funciton as a forum, as per the original remit – outlined here: http://bbpress.org/about/features/ ?
As someone who lives in a country where Facebook is 3rd or 4th favourite Social Network (it fluctuates), and just inside the Top 10 of websites visited, it always amazes me when people go overboard about it as if its the second coming. I like it and use it, but every time i ask someone to back up why they think BBpress needs FBconnect all we get is short annacdotal evidence based on their own desire, so lets get past that and have a nice conversation about it
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Sir,
We don’t agree on these things, but its very cool we can discuss them openly, and in a manner such as this. My hats off to ya’.
On my site I offer Twitter and FB login via IntenseDebate and get people to use them all the time for commenting.
That’s awesome. Could you garnish us with some figures please mate, because the other figures and stats that i could find (Alexa etc.) all point to a poor take up of FBconnect, and a very low “new user” clickthrough – unless replying to a post from facebook (have to get that caveat in there because those stas look good).
Number of Users?
Number of Users who used to signing normally and now use FBconnect?
Number of Users who have never signed in normally but have only used FBconnect?
That would be really useful to us all i think, to put it in context.
You may call it the flavor of the week, but Facebook has more than 350 million active users.
It doesn’t, it has over 200million unique accounts, but it doesn’t have even 200million unique people (i personally run 17 FB accounts between myself, my company, and the charities i help out).
Dont get me wrong, the site is both huge and popular, but its not gotten the number of people that some folks claim. Heck according to Facebook’s Mark Z in February, when it overtook MySpace as the #1 social networking site in the US (again – in the US), that half of its userbase logs in once a day, and 80% of its userbase logs in at least once a month. Now in the month that it overtook MySpace, Alexa claims for 350million page views, its imply cant have 350million people. But that slightly off-topic, so lets bring it back.
If number of possible users is the main positive for FacebookConnect then it fails, as it actually comes 4th. So does that mean we should build FBconnect after writing the other 3 into the core? Or are we going with FBconnect because you use it…
- GoogleFreindFinder (or whatever its new branding is: apparently GoogleSingleSignon) has access to everyone with a (specific type of) gmail account and everyone on Okurt – it covers a ridiculous number of people (worldwide).
- MSN passport has access to everyone with an MSN or Yahoo email address for single signin.
- MySpace uses OpenID so OpenID has access to the third most users.
- Facebook comes in fourth (and there’s a big big gap betwen 3rd and 4th)
Also, its not so much that Facebook is the “flavour of the month”, its just that we’ve seen this all before. The dominant website in its field, looks like no-one will ever topple it and BAM, yesterdays news. The long you spent developing for the internet (this is my 15th paid year), the more you see the simple fact that content is what engages people, regardless of systems or context.
The reason we’re so adamant about this subject is not because we’re being stubborn, its because we’ve had this conversation before. We had it with AoL, we had it when Microsfot rolled out MyPasspost/Hailstorm, we had it when Microsfot rolled out Live, we had it with OpenID, we had it with myspace, We had it with GoogleSingleSignon. I, and in deed we, are not knocking Favebook or FBconnect – its just that its software owned and maintained by a company outwith BBpress, and sooner or later they are going to dip in popularity or make such a large change to the API that the standard BBpress will fail with no notice.
We know this, becuse they already did it 3 times this year
Imagine (as a user…please separate yourself from the admin process) visiting a forum and knowing you can immediately log in and join the discussion with your FB account.
1) You’re going to need a facebook account. There are not as many people with FB accounts as i think you think there are. Not to mention, Non-white, Non-North-America, Non-College-Educated, Non-Under-25s, Non-broadband-users are FAR FAR FAR less likely to have one (80% of FB users tick all those boxes).
2) If you are so engrossed/captivated/moved by the content of a forum post that you feel the need to add to the conversation, is registering really a deterant? As a user, if i really want to comment/reply/converse, i usually see what the registration process is like. I know from my phpBB forums, the drop off after the registration page is loaded is HUGE, and the drop off after a failed registration is over90%. I suggest you check your stats too. Alot more poeple go to registration pages than its presumed, but the registering process is where it ends.
3) Surely, if registration is the problem, our time is better suited on making that easier for the user.
4) Purely from an end user perspective (and not an admin), i dont want to use FBconnect, i can just use anonymous posting and thats the even easier option! FBconnect is a half way house for you as both a user and an admin, but it requires a massive amount of work for the BBpress team – again for a feature that not common, not worldwide, nor often-used.
Matt’s made a comments re: bbPress and forums a while back along the lines that forums really haven’t changed that much in the past ten years. Exactly. Allow stuff like FB connect to encourage conversations and bring them into the next century!
Surely good conversation and topics encourage conversations and not FBconnect. I doubt many people find a forum very boring, but feel compelled to join in just because the website lets them log in via FBconnect.
You know, when somethings been the same for a long time (is basic, usable without too much instruction, and does exaclty what it says on the tin) there usually isn’t a whole lot you can do to make it better; and on the rare occasion when there is… its usually come form a total overhaul and not adding to the original.
I say that because much smarter people than you and I have been using Forums for a greater number of years that either of us, and no-one has yet came up with a better format. There’s an inate desire in humans to make things better, but that does not mean that something can always be improved greatly simply because its worked the same way for a great amount of time.
Also, single signons became availible last century, heck last millenium, and they didn’t take off in the last 10 years because people didn’t want or like them; so somehow integrating FBconnect isn’t going to magically make forums current or “this century”.
I do not understand the opposition to making FB’s core more robust feature wise.
What is the harm in including additional features
We’ve had 1 developer (working close to part-time) on BBpress for 2 years.
We’ve had NO developer working on BBpress since July 15th.
The two main plugin suppliers have left the project.
The wiki / developer documentation is now a loans/spam/porn website
So, who are these magical little elves that are going to build and then maintain all these features??
It kind of reminds me of the Gnomes in South Park http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park).
1. Features
2. ???
3. Kill vBulletin
It seems like step 2, the bit where the work actually comes in, is just presumed to happen magically. Which is the only way it would happen, given that right now our development team consists of… no-one.
Adding more features to the core standardizes those features so they do not break in future builds
Adding thigns to the core doesn’t automatically stabalise them, a developer stablises them.
Again, that developer is currently… no-one.
Thats the issue BBpress has had for the last year. Sam added loads of things to the core, changed loads of functions, hardcoded alot of template functions into the core, and has now gone without telling anyone until months after (N.B. This was Sam’s pain emplyment, and is not a criticism of the man himself – merely a statement of the facts).
These things dont stabalize themselves, they need development, and adding them to the core does not guarentee that, all it does is guarenteee that time is taken away form other things.
allows even better plugins to be unveiled to customize them further.
BBpress 1.0.2 has bee a stable RC release for over 6 months now. Where are all these plug-ins? Where are all the plugin developers rushing to add functionality? Where are all the massively different customisations? *tumbleweed*
Let’s help bbPress evolve and become more robust featurewise so it buries vBulletin
Robust is the polar opposite of harcoding reliance on an extrnal and ever-changing API into core.
And mate, we’re not here to bury vBulletin, thats not the goal; we’re here to make forum software in accordance with the Philosphy and Features on the about page. IF you’re ever wondering if something fits into BBpress, always check https://bbpress.org/about/ and see if it fits into those 5 design philosophies. If it doesn’t, chances are, it wont be going into BBpress.
Take care, and good health.
Kev
@ (my affable sparring partner) kevinjohngallagher:
1) re: the 350 million facebook users, there was just a story on Mashable ‘Facebook’s Road to 350 Million Users’: (http://mashable.com/2009/12/02/facebook-350-million-users/)
“Mark Zuckerberg’s note detailing Facebook’s latest privacy changes also contained an announcement about another important milestone for Facebook: 350 million users.”
Facebook’s own website: (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics):”‘More than 350 million active users”
I’m just going with what they said
2) I don’t have official ‘stats’ but can tell you Facebook connect is put to use on my site (I run Intense Debate, which offers various ways folks can leave comments). Twitter connect is occasionally as well (but not as much as FB connect) My general point is this: it’s optional and it and brings new folks into the discussion. IntenseDebate was smart to incorporate several different optional login methods! From my standpoint, I am very happy to offer FB connect to my readers
3) “So, who are these magical little elves that are going to build and then maintain all these features??” (BTW, I too am a South Park fan so I immediately got your reference):
Build and maintain all those features? You are missing my point…if existing popular plugins like ‘topic views’ or ‘bbcode’ are built into the core a third party no longer needs to maintain the plugin and make sure they don’t break in bbPress 1.0, bbPress 1.1, etc. They are STANDARDIZED and can be further fleshed out! (WordPress example: Just like WordPress did with the automatic updater and ability to thread comments…) _ck_ came up with some really slick and widely used plugins, and she is probably won’t be maintaining them from here on out. Maybe stuff like ‘BBcode Buttons’ should continue as a Core features?
Even though we both disagree on some of these things, we both want the same thing…bbPress to be more widely used & developed and the bbpress community to grow (those that make plugins, templates, etc). I would also like to see bbPress to emerge as a vBulletin alternative.
Again, things like Voices, gravatars, profile pics, profile occupation and location, tags etc could have all been simply left as plugins, but they were incorporated into the core. My overall point (forget FB connect for a sec) is that things like Voices, gravatars, profile pics, profile occupations, location, and other features are part of the core and that is a very good thing! It makes it easier for bbPress to be more widely used because a separate plugin is not needed for each (good for newbies, stability, and so community can further flesh them out via plugins or themes) There is less danger of those features breaking (they are now features of the Core, not separate plugins). The use of those features is standardized so plugins and themes can be developed to make use of those features without requiring a plugin to use each.
In a nutshell, I think things like bbcode, topic views, and some other plugins should sit alongside Voices, gravatars, etc as features that should be incorporated into the Core.
kevinjohngallagher, I love your passion. I am someone who is probably not as skilled as you are with computers and technology (17FB accounts…you sound busy!) I’m not a developer, just some newbie that taught himself how to run WordPress and bbPress by messing around with the stuff.
We aren’t going to agree on Facebook-connect (it’s a tougher sell than some of the others), but I would wager that there is probably a popular plugin or two that you might also agree should logically be part of the core for stability and out-of-the-box-feature issues. Thoughts?
@ chrishajer, just curious, have you had any issue with your 3 forums’ bbPress registration emails hitting folks’ spam folks? Had this issue with Yahoo, gmail, hotmail and other emails accounts. (It’s still not 100% resolved with all email accounts)
I must confess, this was initially a bit of a headache for this server newbie. (People complain that the registration doesn’t work, others don’t say anything and give up on the site at that point thinking the software doesn’t work) This really isn’t a problem with bbPress, but it is a tough issue to figure out when you are just learning the LAMP ropes. Thank goodness for knowledgeable server buddies!
Not sure if this explains anything, but this is one of the reasons (a minor one) why this LAMP newbie like the idea of allowing others ways to login like FB Connect…(it eliminates that potentially-troublesome email verification step and allows them to jump right in).
BTW, I would be ecstatic is FB Connect emerged as a plugin first and the next bbPress release focused on other things like integration, some cool new features, etc. You are a good salesman.
My mom is on facebook, so does my 60yrs old auth and uncle… and they are all living on the island of Borneo (googling it would probably show up among ‘the remaining lost world on earth’). So I got 3 ppl for my hard stats
I’m using WPMU+Buddypress and integrated with bbpress — since there are facebookconnect plugins for WPMU, and now facebook plugin specific for WPMU+BP, my installation of bbpress on WPMU+BP becomes the odd one. While BP is now with its own forum system, I have more reasons to abandon bbpress; yet I do hope facebook-enabled bbpress would make me continue to use this.
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