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There are pros and cons for having the login process on the website done through Facebook Connect or Twitter sign in, rather than rolling your own registration process:


  • use existing account -> less steps (registration/verification)
  • get a lot of meta data such as first name, last name, address, etc.
  • get list of friends -> easier to go viral


  • API outages
  • could be banned by Facebook/Twitter any time
  • user may not want to share its Facebook/Twitter account with you

API outages, due to Facebook/Twitter to be unavailable or too slow,might happen more often than I expected.

My current feeling is to propose both type of registration: my own, and Facebook and/or Twitter.

What do you think is the best registration strategy for a website that targets a large public, with no sensitive information saved in the user's profile (no payment information for example)?

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3 Answers 3

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Why not use openID or oAuth? That would free yourself from being tied to one or two specific identity providers.

The other thought that comes to mind, is if you use one of the above, and you can support linking multiple external authentication ID's to a single user's ID on your side, is then if one goes down, the user can login using one of the other authenticators.

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Honestly though, do you think your own registration system would have better uptime?

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But now you have downtime that is your own fault + downtime due to dependent services. –  Bryan Batchelder Aug 7 '09 at 21:00
I don't really see how a custom registration system would have any worse uptime than the system it acts as a registration system for. –  Jason S Aug 7 '09 at 21:18
Well ask yourself, are you as qualified to run and administer a server as Facebook and Twitter are? –  samoz Aug 7 '09 at 21:20
@samoz: the point is that if you get DOSed, then you're down regardless. having your own registration prevents you from also going down when Facebook goes down. –  Jimmy Aug 7 '09 at 21:35
Well, I would say it has the same uptime as the rest of my website. It the entire website is down, I don't care if the registration is up :-) Int this case, this is a problem of the addition of problems, not the intersection. –  Julien Aug 7 '09 at 23:31

The fact they have been hit by a DOS attack will now lead them to make their infrastructure more robust, so in future I'd expect them to be much better placed to deal with this.

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