Thanks to a new bit of technology from Facebook, the need to fill out endless registration and sign-up forms when using a new site or app might soon become obsolete.
It was once a big deal that you could log in to any given website or app using Facebook. Now, Facebook will be able to give third-party sites even more of the typical details you might use to sign up for a new account.
With the new tool for developers, signing up for a new website or web app account can take seconds rather than minutes. User data, when available, can be grabbed from Facebook and inserted into the form. Think of it as Facebook’s version of Google’s autocomplete tools.
Facebook engineer Paul Tarjan wrote today on the Facebook developer blog that these permissions work out well for everyone involved, including end users as well as website owners: “By minimizing the friction associated with signing up for a new account and making it easy for people to bring their friends with them, we’ve seen that people are more likely to complete the sign up process, stay on sites longer, share more content and come back more often. For example, in beta tests with FriendFeed, Facebook sign ups increased 300%.”
Better still, the new registration tool is as simple to start using as a single line of code. It’s an iframe that can be customized to include any fields you need for your particular sign-up form. If the user signing up for your site or app is logged into Facebook and has the relevant information filled out in his Facebook profile, your form should be programmatically completed with a bow on top.
Developers can get users’ names, e-mail addresses, locations or other information stored on Facebook. They can also add custom information.
Users will be able to control what information is shared, as well. They can also choose to fill out registration forms manually rather than through Facebook’s tool. As Tarjan writes, “Because the tool works through an iframe, no data is shared with the website until the user clicks ‘Register.’”
Developers should be able to make registering for new sites and apps a lot faster — and make the site/app experience more personal — with this new tool.
Interested devs can check out Tarjan’s post and the documentation to learn more about implementing the registration tools on their sites.
Reviews: Facebook, FriendFeed, Google
More About: facebook, facebook connect, facebook login, registration
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