Posted on: September 29th, 2009 by Beth Granter

Are you building a site with user interaction? Comments? Personalisation? User generated content? If so, then starting from scratch, and asking users to complete long registration forms, may not be the right way about it. Unless data capture is the goal of the site, and if content creation and engagement are, then allowing users to use logins they’re already familiar with can remove a huge barrier for the user. There are a number of options available, for example, Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect , OpenSocial , Disqus and Sign in with Twitter .

Let’s just look at Facebook Connect for now, because right now that’s the login that people online are most likely to have. The benefit is that users can sign in and interact with your site immediately. They also have the option to share their photos, friends, events and activity stream with your site. This can be used in its most simple and functional form, to allow users to comment on news articles, as HuffingtonPost have done:

HuffingtonPost also use your friends network from Facebook so you can see how they have interacted on the site.

A very creative implementation of Facebook Connect is The Prototype Experience , which puts items from your Facebook account into a trailer for a computer game, resulting in a slightly disturbing effect!

Until there is one universal user account for everybody across all sites though, we’ll have to keep offering the standard alternative of registering with your site on its own, alongside any of the smoother options above. There’s also the issue of privacy and whether people will feel comfortable sharing their data across websites, particularly with new organisations they’re not yet comfortable with… but that’s a separate blog post in itself!

More examples of Facebook Connect in action.