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Re:Facebook was down by grey-area on Thursday June 19, 2014 @04:33AM (#7915179)
This is just one of the reasons you shouldn't build your business on someone else's platform - others include the possibility that they'll charge you for the service later, cut you out of a relationship with your own customers, shut you down for their own reasons, require you to use their services like a store to the exclusion of all others, copy your idea and crush you by giving it away for free, squeeze your margins until your business is no longer viable, or simply make your business impossible because of indifference to your requirements.

That the service may be unreliable and it's one more point of failure is just one of the reasons why it's a bad idea to depend on FB (or Twitter, or G+ login) for your logins, and this is why their attempt to subsume the web with corporate corrals will ultimately fail.

Re:Facebook was down by dasil003 on Thursday June 19, 2014 @07:41AM (#7915593)
I agree with you in principle, however you are ignoring the business value the external auth provides. Specifically there is a large subset of potential users who can not be bothered to sign up for your site via email, but will login with Facebook.

If you want to take advantage of this market then there are ways to use Login with Facebook without being wholly dependent. Basically if you have full account management, but you allow third-party authentication that ties into that account, especially allowing multiple OAuth providers to be linked to a single of your internal accounts (eg. see how Stack Overflow works), you can significantly mitigate the downside.

The purist and old-school web head and open standards guy in me hates it, but you can't argue with the business case for it.

Re:Facebook was down by drewblay on Thursday June 19, 2014 @08:23AM (#7915681)
>there is a large subset of potential users who can not be bothered to sign up for your site via email

There is a simple solution to this. STOP ASKING USERS TO SIGN UP! Do your REALLY need to collect the users e-mail? Do REALLY need them to have an account at all? If you do, then when they register don't ask for their e-mail address if it isn't necessary, or at least make the e-mail address an optional field. Hacker News never asked for my e-mail, because there is no need for them to have it. I probably wouldn't have made an account if it did require an e-mail address.

Re:Facebook was down by grey-area on Thursday June 19, 2014 @08:26AM (#7915685)
Sure, it's a trade-off, we probably just disagree about the level of risk involved and the benefits gained.

As you say with FB login there are ways to mitigate that risk, but to take one example - if FB charge for the service in future at 0.01c per use, many of your users will still want to login with FB because it's easier for them, and you'll be stuck with the bill. This happened with sites using google maps in 2012 when they started charging - each of these decisions has to be weighed up individually as a risk, but I think login is too important to delegate to another site and a significant addition of complexity and risk.

Re:Facebook was down by dasil003 on Thursday June 19, 2014 @06:24PM (#7918609)
It's not one level of risk-reward, you need to take a look at your specific case to make the call. Formulating a blanket opinion about this outside of a specific context is not wise.

That said, your example doesn't demonstrate much risk at all. What are the incentives for FB to start charging for this? It just doesn't make any sense for them to give up that data and that control to try to squeeze existing site operators out of a buck. I mean, never say never, but the risk is much less than it was with Google Maps where you always had to be asking what Google was getting out of this expensive and difficult-to-build-your-own service.

Re:Facebook was down by sprite on Thursday June 19, 2014 @08:04AM (#7915635)
Facebook deleted my personal account and disabled all my fb API keys for releasing an app for Instagram that they claim violates the Instagram tos. The app has nothing to do with Facebook. This was done with no warning.
Re:Facebook was down by ZenPro on Thursday June 19, 2014 @09:08AM (#7915834)
...apart from them owning Instagram.

It's naive to assume that a company will defend their subsidiary. I am not condoning how they treated you but your assertion of the app has nothing to do with Facebook is incredulous.

Re:Facebook was down by mjburgess on Thursday June 19, 2014 @04:53AM (#7915248)
What are you talking about? Everyone has to depend on some infrastruture to provide their service. I'd imagine pretty much every hosting platform (from amazon to dreamhost) has less reliability than facebook.
Re:Facebook was down by grey-area on Thursday June 19, 2014 @07:02AM (#7915521)
Hosting is fungible and should be easy to change, a reliance on a platform like FB or Twitter say is not.

Also, reliability is one factor out of several, it is not the only, or even the primary, risk with using something like FB login.

Re:Facebook was down by jacquesm on Thursday June 19, 2014 @05:01AM (#7915273)
Sure, but the more external components you tie in to the bigger the chance that one of them will be down. So you try to keep such dependencies to an absolute minimum otherwise you end up with the joint downtime of all those services.
Re:Facebook was down by rgo on Thursday June 19, 2014 @06:31AM (#7915457)
External dependencies increase failure points, no argue there.

It depends on your line of business, but if you compare the benefits of making user signup faster, lowering acquisition barriers and getting access to the social graph of users against the risks of depending on one of the top infrastructures in the cloud, I think it may well be worth the trouble.

Re:Facebook was down by mjburgess on Thursday June 19, 2014 @05:53AM (#7915383)
No, that's not how risk works. Centralization of services to a single platform is more risky.
Re:Facebook was down by akkishore on Thursday June 19, 2014 @06:04AM (#7915410)
Your risk increases with more moving parts that you introduce into your product. It does not decrease.

Probably you are talking about redundancy where, I agree, it does go down.

Re:Facebook was down by KayEss on Thursday June 19, 2014 @06:50AM (#7915499)
You're both right, if you talk about different sorts of risk. There's far more chance that you'll get authentication wrong than Facebook -- and that's a risk. It's probably more likely that your authentication service will go down than Facebook's. But if it's all yours then Facebook has no control over you, so that's one less risk.

As for which risk is the most important risk, well, that's up to your business to decide. But nothing is without risk, all you can do is choose which to expose yourself to.

Re:Facebook was down by thejosh on Thursday June 19, 2014 @05:31AM (#7915337)
(S)he's talking about if you rely on an API/Third Party service over hosting.

You can packup your application and move it to Amazon/Rackspace/DigitalOcean, but if you use Facebook login exclusively or use a third party API for a core service and they decide to change (as GP suggests), you're fucked.

Re:Facebook was down by babuskov on Thursday June 19, 2014 @08:50AM (#7915753)
As with all other stuff: it depends.

Using it for logins is really questionable. But if you are, for example, building a game for Facebook, it gives you many advantages, so occasional downtime is not really the biggest issue. Let's check the things you wrote about in gaming context:

- charging for the service later TRUE (viral is dead, you pay for the ads to get new players in)

- cut you out of a relationship with your own customer - somewhat FALSE (you can request e-mails from your customers, and have a direct contact afterwards). Even with fan pages, they are not cuting you out, but merely asking to pay to get your message to them

- require you to use their store TRUE, but every other platform does the same

- copy your idea and give it for free. FALSE - Facebook never made a game AFAIK

- squezee you margins. TRUE. I do notice that Cost Per Install for my games is getting higher the more I advertize, and that it suddenly jumped from about $0.15 per install to $0.50 per install a few days ago - about the same time when they switched to the new payment user interface.

Re:Facebook was down by V-2 on Thursday June 19, 2014 @05:32AM (#7915343)
"copy your idea and crush you by giving it away for free" - this is a possibility no matter what you do
Re:Facebook was down by jacquesm on Thursday June 19, 2014 @05:36AM (#7915351)
Sure, but by giving them your users log-ins you are telling them how popular you are so they can sit back and wait until you reach a certain threshold or velocity. Why give a would-be competitor extra information?
Re:Facebook was down by pjc50 on Thursday June 19, 2014 @05:15AM (#7915299)
If your business is "facebook games", it's rather hard not to build it on Facebook.
Re:Facebook was down by pling on Thursday June 19, 2014 @07:41AM (#7915594)
If your business is facebook games, about all that happens if you go down is "meh". Is that a good business model?

Probably not.