Imagine you are visiting a Website that offers free access, but only to registered users. At the top of the page are a number of options. You can create a new identity, or you can just sign in using your Facebook account, your Google account, or one of several other online identities you already have.
Which do you pick? And could your choice tip the balance of power between the big internet companies?
That second question has been nagging at me since the end of last week. It was prompted by the launch, on the same day, of Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. They are based on a common idea: let internet users take the same online identity with them wherever they go on the Web, and interact with the same network of friends once they get there.
There is already anecdotal evidence of the power of this single sign-in. Facebook says that trials over the last few months show that, when offered a choice, twice as many people sign in to a Website using their Facebook account as use the site’s own log-in process. Once there, they are likely to stay longer if they can engage with their friends. For the users and the Websites concerned, this sounds like it’s all upside. But what does it mean for the competition between Google and Facebook – not to mention Yahoo or other sites where you currently maintain an “identity”?
There are two ways to look at this. One is that your choice of sign-in will help to determine which will come to be your primary identity. If you take Facebook (and your Facebook friends) with you everywhere you go, then eventually Facebook will come to assume a central position in your online life. Eventually, that could be a money-maker for Facebook, though for now there are no revenue-sharing arrangements tied to Facebook Connect.
The second way to look at it was put to me by Charlene Li, who recently left Forrester to found her own research firm, Altimeter Group. She sees online social networks revolving around the internet user, not the other way around. Eventually it won’t matter which sign-in you use, she says: there will only be one, standardised method. Users will then pick from their various online networks to assemble an ad-hoc network suited to that particular situation. On a cooking site, for instance, the group of people you want to interact with – and the persona you want to adopt – will be different from your network and persona on a work-related site.
“It’s not about one standard winning over the other, it’s not about Betamax versus VHS,” says Ms Li. “At some point everything will connect, because the user will absolutely demand it.”
Perhaps. But how long will that take, and what will happen in the meantime? If you find it useful to drag your (proprietary) Facebook identity around with you, will that become the norm? And if it does, will Facebook really have as much incentive to open up?
