FBConnect – 5 reasons why we dumped it.

A while back, my partner wrote a post on why we chose to launch with FBConnect as our exclusive login system.

Well, our  other partner has been working to integrate FBConnect for awhile now, and he’s changed our minds; we’ve trashed the idea.  Thought I’d let you guys know why.

5 Reasons why NOT to use FBConnect exclusively?

1. The unreliability of Facebook, especially lately.  If we are relying on their systems to keep track of our users, and we require people to be logged in to participate, then we break the minute Facebook breaks.  And they’ve been particularly snailish/breakish lately.
2. The ability people have to close their profiles to FBConnect, meaning we could not store personal user information for them.
3. The limited audience.  Sure, 150 million is a lot, but not necessarily our market.  We’ve begun researching what niche we think we could fill and, suffice to say, we think there are a lot of folks outside of the Facebook community who we may have a better chance of attracting.
4. As far as we can tell, actions are NOT posted on your friends’ newsfeeds, but instead only on your profile’s newsfeed.  And really, how often are you reading your friends’ profiles’ newsfeeds??
5. Every time a user wants to add something to their profile, a box pops up asking them what format it should be in and to confirm it.  I used this a few times on a site that had implemented FBConnect, and hated it.  What a hassle.  I now decline the offer to post anything with FBConnect.
6. PSYCH!  A sixth I thought of: we want our users’ email addresses.  No, we don’t want to spam them, but we do want the ability to send monthly reminder emails/newsletters…

4 things that keep us hooked…

1. We want people to be able to easily invite their Facebook friends to participate in a discussion.  We can use FBConnect to send friends these invites.
2. People should be able to immediately find their interests.  If they login without FBConnect, we’ll have to prompt them to enter in interests.  With FBConnect, we can just scrape that data from their profile and have suggested topics ready.
3. People can immediately see which of their friends are on Trogger and who we suggest they follow.
4. If people DO want to post a story to their walls, we don’t want to stop them.

Have you guys made similar decisions?  Different ones?  We are still considering it, and could be swayed…

Troggerpath – what’s up?

So Tuesday is wrapping up; a day spent fidgeting around with AdobePhotoshop, scanning the competition and noting their strengths and weaknesses, and debating with Raph and Christian about whether to start a blog.  We don’t want it evangelizing the greatness of our work with absolutely nothing to show, nor do we want to appear as ignorant, inexperienced, or unprofessional.  However, we thought it would be interesting to chronicle the development of a new company – from design and development, through adviser and investor meetings, and on to user growth and metric results.

I’m pretty firmly in the camp that having an informal company blog is a must.  It gets content up on our site right away.  It lets our interested beta testers know what is going on.  It informs our past event attendees of what we are working on now.  And it, hopefully, comes to provide helpful information to other startups.  I plan to write little right about the books and blogs I am reading, the information I am gaining at our various meetings, the ways we are solving internal disputes, the methods we are using to measure site growth, and anything else that I hope could be relevant to others (and that I might want to refer back to later.)

First things first, I need to stop being distracted by fun Facebook apps, and start learning more.