Arguments Against Using Facebook Connect as Your Primary Log in Mechanism →
Buzz Anderson, commenting on Bijan Sabet’s post:
For the (I suspect rapidly growing) portion of us who only grudgingly maintain any sort of Facebook presence, it’s like asking us to reaffirm our commitment to a religion before being allowed to eat in your restaurant.
I wholeheartedly agree with this, but it’s not the thing that bothers me the most about Facebook-based authentication (or Twitter-based authentication for that matter.) The benefits of using other platforms to lower the sign-up barrier don’t outweigh the drawbacks of being tied to the another property for something as pivotal as logging in to your own service. If you think Facebook is too big to fail, think again. Nothing lasts forever. No matter how long the timeline is, there will come a point on it where you’ll have to move away from 3rd party tokens for authentication. Whether it’s the downfall of Facebook/Twitter as a popular platform, their cessation of the authentication program or simply a political disagreement.
And then you’ll be stuck with the task of messaging, inconveniencing and supporting your user base through the log in process, which is, ironically, exactly what you were trying to avoid doing in the first place.
