It seems that more and more sites are sprouting up with the ability to skip the signup process in favor of using your Facebook login instead.

Is this good? Yes and no.

I actually do appreciate the sites where I can login using Facebook. One such example is Scribd where you see at top right the big ‘Login with Facebook’ button:

What this does is allow you to use Facebook to authenticate into the site. This is convenient because it’s one less username/password you have to remember.

This convenience doesn’t come without its drawbacks however.

Drawback #1: Facebook is sometimes slow

Everybody at some point has encountered times where the Facebook site is just plain slow; this extends to when using the site for user authentication purposes as well.

What this means is that even if the site you’re attempting to login to is operating normally, if Facebook happens to be running slow at the time, you’re forced to wait needlessly.

Drawback #2: Using Facebook as your authentication method does at times "hiccup"

You go to a site that uses Facebook as your authentication method, but you can’t login. Something happened. The system says you’re not logged in even though you are, restarting the browser doesn’t help and ultimately you’re forced to completely log out of Facebook, restart the browser again, login with Facebook and then it works.

This is obviously annoying to deal with, but it does sometimes happen. Somewhere along the line the transport between the site you were attempting to login to and Facebook flubbed up. Granted, it’s fixable by you as described above, but still, it’s annoying.

Drawback #3: What is that site asking in return for being able to login using Facebook?

Using Scribd as an example again, when you click the Login with Facebook button, you see this:

The permission request screen is not always the same for every site. Some require a lot of information while others require only a little.

This is what happens when you use Facebook to login to Scribd:

You have to be really, really comfortable with what Scribd is asking for here because you will be giving them a list of all your friends and a list of all networks you’re connected to.

Some of you will say, "So? No big deal. That’s cool" and go right ahead with it, while others will say "Give them a list of all my friends? I DON’T THINK SO!" and give this a miss in favor of a traditional method of authentication (meaning outside of Facebook) instead.

I want to make clear that it’s not just Scribd that wants this type of info from authenticating to Facebook, because many others want the same if not more information.

As mentioned above, you have to be really comfortable with the info you give out by authenticating to other sites with Facebook.

I’m not saying not to use Facebook as a way to login to other sites that offer the capability as it is genuinely convenient to do so – but just be aware of what you’re getting into by going that route.

Like what you read?

If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below: