Article originally written by Alex Davis.
Social login is increasingly being adopted by developers. The main reasons developers are jumping on this are:
- an availability of accurate user data from social networks,
- a reduction in forgotten usernames and passwords, and
- an increase in user registrations.
However, these benefits do not come without hurdles. They are:
1- Choosing Social Networks
The thought process of a developer looking to add social login is usually something similar to this:
- Do we implement Facebook and/or Twitter?
- What about LinkedIn? They return a lot of data.
- Or do we replace Twitter with Google+? They're growing quickly and so many people have Google accounts.
- But our site is about music so maybe integrating MySpace would be a good idea?
- Is MySpace still popular?
- How many social networks should we support?
Implementing social login is a difficult task from the beginning if you plan on doing it alone. All the largest social networks around the world offer social login and it doesn't take long to realize that it is nearly an impossible mission to integrate more than 2 social networks without allocating significant human resources to the deployment and maintenance of the login. As an example, we'll use the scenario of a website that decided to integrate Facebook, Twitter and Google on their own.
2- Learning the APIs
When the research begins, developers start to realize that very few of these APIs follow the same standards and what might have worked yesterday changed in an update today. Twitter is still on OAuth 1.0, Google closed Buzz running on Hybrid Protocol (OAuth 1.0 combined with OpenID) to then launch Google+ on OAuth 2.0. This version is not the same as the OAuth 2.0 that Facebook is using. And the nightmare begins.
One of the main advantages of integrating social login is the rich data made available from the social networks. However, there is no standardization in the field structure and nomenclature to facilitate programming. Every time you want to add a new data type offered by one or more social network, programming will be required.
3- Maintaining the APIs
In the last year, Facebook has released major updates to its API twice, Google once and well, Twitter is behind technology wise so a change is imminent (we're ignoring the fact that Microsoft and others also released major upgrades to their APIs since they're not included in the scenario of our example). These major changes require developers to do research and to update their code. Changes are not always expected and this can cripple your login until you put your current projects aside to fix it.
4- Using Data
Social login returns large amounts of data to websites. Using it can be challenging when you try to offer multiple networks since each network returns different amounts of data, in different formats and with different field structures.
In terms of Analytics, Facebook is the only social network offering interesting numbers based on the API usage. It's called Facebook Insight for Apps. You can see the number of logins, shares, reach, the age group and gender breakdown of your users and few other details. Facebook might be the only social network to offer analytics but it has already set the bar very high. The downfall is that it is a very macro perspective. It doesn't give you statistics on the behavior of individual users. It only offers trends.
Google will be launching in a few weeks Analytics for company profile pages on Google+. Although there is no mention about analytics for their API, we can imagine that it's a matter a of time until they catch up.
Over time, the challenge will become monitoring your analytics for every social network that you offer as login. Your data will not be available in a central location.
Lanoba
There is an easier way to add social login to your website. Lanoba enables you to offer more than 8 different login solutions, giving your users the choice they want.
Developers won't need to learn various different APIs and they won't need to maintain their code with every update to the social networks APIs. Lanoba handles this for you.
Finally, Lanoba helps you make sense of all the data you are gathering by offering you real-time analytics that will help you guide your business strategy and better plan your next ad campaigns.