I was reading today in the The Business Insider Insider that Facebook Connect was being hailed as a huge success. I started putting Facebook Connect onto client applications and websites pretty soon after it was released to the development community. I am not typically an early adopter of any technology until I have had a chance to see it in action for a little while but Facebook has such a reach right now into so many households that I had a pretty good hunch that it was going to take off.
The idea of a user being able to use their Facebook account to login to their favorite websites or applications outside of the Facebook network is pure genius. Let’s face it, no one likes keeping up with their login credentials for the various websites and services that they use. The OpenID project probably had the idea before anyone else thought of it, and I guess there is also a few .net people out there that would argue that Microsoft’s passport has been around for a while too, but neither one of these two services have ever been able to recruit the volume of users that Facebook has, and probably never will…
Speaking from a developers perspective it’s a win-win situation. You provide users with an easy, one click way to authenticate themselves, or login to your application and you don’t have to store any login credentials or personal information on your end. Something else I have found about Facebook Connect that I share with a lot of my clients is that the perception of Facebook has changed dramatically, even over the past year or so. If you watch CNN you might have noticed that they are using CNN and Twitter to cover the uprising in Iran…
Here are some quick stats that were provided by Facebook to the insider:
- Registration: sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites.
- Engagement: sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content
- Traffic: For each story published in Facebook, we see roughly 3 clicks back to the site. Nearly half the stories in the Stream get clicked on. This creates opportunities for the site to encourage more user actions – knowing that each one may result in 3 new visits to their site. With other models like search, there’s nothing you can do to increase user traffic besides optimizing for keywords.
IT is so good