The Downsides Of Adopting Facebook Connect
Ty Ahmad-Taylor is the founder and CEO of FanFeedr, a real-time personalized sports feed. Previously, he was SVP of Strategy and Product Development at Viacom (NYSE: VIA) and, before that, Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA). He tweets at @tyahma
One of the things big and small media companies grapple with is identity, and the larger issue of owning the customer. This often comes into play with user-authentication systems, and specifically whether media companies should use their own or tap into existing third-party networks that often have broader reach. When I was at Viacom in 2007, we had our own user-authentication system that had over 1 million addresses, but we never did much with the addresses we captured. We started over with Flux, our own social network. The result? Only about 1.5% of the users signed up. It didn’t help that they had to jump through some crazy hoops (Captcha and email verification; no blood samples, though).
In starting my own business, I very quickly got past any emotional attachment to having a user
Interesting article highlighting one of the drawbacks of Facebook Connect, one that i’ve been thinking about for a while: the loss of owning your customers email addresses. #in
Point #3 is a really important one and will be driven home the day (or days) in the future when Facebook has technical problems. Only then will sites wake up and realize they have abdicated way too much to a solo gatekeeper that has a distinctly different agenda from each of the individual sites they ostensibly control.