Penguins Tumbl and Judge

joesunga:

bijan:

When I see startups that only offer FB Connect as the singular sign in option, I always get squeamish. 

I tell founders they should support FB Connect but they also support Twitter sign-in as well as giving users an option to sign in the good old fashioned way : user id & password.

Sometimes founders ask if our investment in Twitter is the cause of my recommendation. 

The answer is no. It’s based on the behavior and data we see in our portfolio companies. 

Giving users only one way to sign in and FB as the only option is going to turn off a large number of users. Some people want to sign in with an alias for example.

But the biggest issue is the screen your users will see when they try to sign in with Facebook Connect. Here’s an example. Today I tried to sign up for Topsy with Facebook Connect.

(to be clear: Topsy supports other sign in options - but I wanted to show you what the FB connect screen looks like)

That’s a rough screen in my opinion. It makes some users confused. Will my data be okay? Will Topsy start sticking stuff on my Facebook without asking me. What gets shared and where? Too many questions and too many concerns. 

That’s not how to build a relationship between you and your users.

You want to make life easier - not freak them out.

Instead offer them a simple sign up screen. The one I point to all the time is Tumblr’s sign up process. Couldn’t be simpler or more beautiful in my opinion.

So in summary, I’m good with FB Connect as an option. Just make it an option that’s all. 

I remember talking with my brother about Spotify and how I’ve been using it a ton. Being that my brother is one of those guys who knows all of the bands and new artists, I felt he’d jump right into Spotify — but he didn’t. One big reason was that he had to sign in with Facebook. If there was a simple regular sign up process, he probably would have already been using it.

Granted, if it only had a Twitter sign up option, he probably would have been reluctant as well.