Good examples of Social Sign In?

November 7, 2009 10:43 AM

Any good examples of "Social Sign In"? For the little web toys I make, I don't want to make full sign up forms, so I'm looking for any sites that are using Facebook / Twitter / Google / Yahoo / OpenID / etc for sign in. Something like what stack overflow is doing here: http://stackoverflow.com/users/login (only OpenID though).
posted by slactoid to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Galley Slaves does it for comments.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:50 AM on November 7, 2009

Check the Facebook Connect pages for examples. Getsatisfaction would be one example.

But what exactly is it you want to have examples for? The way your users will be logging in pretty much determined by the service you will be using.
posted by oxit at 11:09 AM on November 7, 2009

OpenID is specifically for this. It's meant for authenticating people on other sites. Facebook, Twitter, etc., aren't the same thing at all. The only reason you can "hand off" authentication to OpenID is because that's what it's designed for.
posted by odinsdream at 12:33 PM on November 7, 2009

Yeah, go with OpenID. I hate "Facebook Connect" and never use it. Why on earth would I want to give some random site all of my personal information including my real name, my list of friends, etc. Facebook is so promiscuous with user data it's ridiculous.

OpenID is great. Anyone with a Google, MySpace or Yahoo account can use it, and if they want too users can setup their own OpenID provider on their own server, which is what I do.
posted by delmoi at 2:01 PM on November 7, 2009

OpenID is a good idea, but it's tough to kind of communicate to the average person what it does. People instantly get "sign in via facebook"... you know?
posted by ph00dz at 2:14 PM on November 7, 2009

JANRain's RPX does this. It gives your users a box with up to 6 (in the free version) icons of popular sites (facebook, google apps, myspace etc) and the sign on is passed to your webapp through a very simple URL callback thing.
posted by neustile at 3:29 PM on November 7, 2009

The company I work for (in profile) uses Twitter OAuth exclusively for login. You actually can't create a native account on our site without logging in with Twitter. It's quite a bit more ambitious than a Facebook Connect for blog comments, and the point isn't to just spam people's Twitter feeds with posts from our API - we're actually not even equipped to do that. It's purely the easiest way to allow our target audience create an account and interact with the features on the site restricted to logged in users.
posted by sachinag at 4:37 PM on November 7, 2009

In theory, OpenID is the thing. In reality, it's "Would you like to sign in with Facebook or Twitter?" because the uptake for OpenID among the normals is very low.
posted by DarlingBri at 1:00 AM on November 8, 2009