My Web Without Facebook Connect
I have had better days. I woke up to the sound of a hailstorm beating my bedroom window to pulp. I saw weather gods in passive aggressive mood and pelt San Francisco with sleet right at the time I go for my early morning walk.
Context & Ripple Effects
The piece lands at the tail end of a four-year arc: Facebook's platform ambitions were already being tracked back in December 2007, the open-data-portability conversation was framed by efforts like Google's GData in 2006, and by April 2010 Robert Scoble was arguing it was too late to regulate Facebook.
What this column adds to that arc is a user-side proof point: with syndicated pickup absent and reaction threads empty, the story travelled narrowly, but its confirmed core claim — that a deliberate day off Facebook Connect exposes how much routine sign-in depends on one provider — turns an abstract platform-power debate into something a single reader can feel.
First-order effects
- Sites that gate comments or accounts behind Facebook Connect lose those users entirely when someone opts out, making the publisher's own audience the immediate casualty of the dependency.
Second-order effects
- Rival identity providers — Google and Twitter most visibly in this period — get a sales argument for offering alternate sign-in buttons, since publishers now see single-provider login as concentrated risk rather than free convenience.
Third-order effects
- If social login keeps consolidating around one network, identity drifts toward de facto utility status, reviving exactly the portability-and-regulation questions the GData-era and Scoble-era coverage raised before the dependency became this tangible.
The trend: Web sign-in is consolidating around a small set of social identity providers, converting login plumbing into a strategic chokepoint that users only notice when it disappears.