You’ve probably been in this situation. You go to a website, read an interesting article and feel like leaving a comment about it or rating it and… one second later – you close the page and never visit it again.
What happened? The answer is so simple – the website required registration in order to perform any of these actions. That is a huge barrier of entry for most of the users. After all – I myself cannot count the number of profiles I’ve created on the web over the years; therefore I’m not exactly anxious to fill in another registration form so that I could leave a comment.
So how can we solve this? Let’s not forget that most of the visitors to your brand new website already have a profile at, say, Facebook.com, so all we need is to give those users an opportunity to use that fact to get them registered on our site as well. The only user involvement required is for him to click one button, (optionally) enter their Facebook.com login and password and click a confirm button. And that’s it – the user is now registered at your site.
Say again? I can allow Facebook users use my site as if they are my own? You can do that? Yes, you can. So… how much will it cost me, and how difficult it will be to implement? Well Facebook doesn’t charge anything for it, as for implementation – it’s not very difficult, so it won’t cost you an arm and a leg.
Similar solutions have recently become a popular trend on the web. It’s not just Facebook – even here in Latvia, the most popular social network draugiem.lv is offering a similar service. Another popular solution using an open standard called OpenID is offered by Google, Livejournal.com and WordPress.com to name a few.
Implementing these solutions is relatively easy, and as a result you can remove that huge barrier of entry to your site called the registration form.