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http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/techno...-1B8297602

Quote:A bug with Facebook's ubiquitous embedded widgets redirected millions from the websites they were visiting to Facebook itself Thursday. It's now fixed, but for awhile, some of the largest sites in the world were inaccessible.

Visitors to such sites as CNN, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, the Gawker network (including Gizmodo), and NBC News were instantly transferred to a Facebook error page upon loading the intended site.

Users not logged into Facebook did not get the error, which led people to conclude, correctly, that the problem was with the Facebook Connect service, which governs "likes," "comments" and other Web-based features of the social network.

I don't understand why sites give away their control by allowing Facebook to be a go-between for services. I'm more than happy to login or create a new account but when I see a FB or Twitter login I move on. I will NOT use my social pages to enhance 3rd party sites nor will I as a webmaster give away my visitors.

Todays redirection bug imho is just one of many possible problems.

I agree also. In cases of like HF, grabbing members' info would be so easy. From other members, not admins.

I've always been against "widgets" from third party services. Not only do you open yourself up to these types of issues, they also slow your site down.

I agree. I dislike signing up on sites which offer social network logins.

Same here. I don't mind registering normally, but I am not linking my FB/Twitter with every site I join.

(2013-02-08, 01:50 PM)Wildcard Wrote: [ -> ]Same here. I don't mind registering normally, but I am not linking my FB/Twitter with every site I join.

I have a separate fb account with nothing on it that i solely use for signing up if i really need to.

This conversation is striking me as really short-sighted.

First of all, yeah, let's get this out of the way: this was a totally inexcusable error on Facebook's part. They are going to need to answer for this. But does this one incident invalidate every use of social media?

Sites shouldn't force you to have an account on one service to make an account with their service – I agree with that. But if you won't sign up with sites that offer the option at all, you're in an extreme minority – one billion people are active on Facebook, and many of them are using features like Facebook Connect happily, and to little detriment.

While I can see why people like Labrocca – who are largely catering to technical demographics – wouldn't see the value in things like Facebook Like et al., those features are a great way to encourage users to share content and get it out to people who may otherwise have never heard of your site.

Sweeping generalizations are generally in poor form, and I'd have to say that this is the case here. I've been meaning to write something about using social media in conjunction with forums, but I'm doing such a bad job of it on my own right now that I'm putting it off haha

Logging in via twitter/Facebook etc is fine by me. It's when sites use those widgets (you know the ones I mean - x people have liked us on facebook, here are our latest tweets even though you can read the full articles from the page you're currently on) that I dislike.

Sounds like you dislike them from a design standpoint, not a technical one. I agree that dedicating huge amounts of space to those things is poor form.

Not just design, but also due to the speed impact. If for some reason the external service is unavailable (this happens a shockingly large amount with twitter primarily), users are still forced to wait for that HTTP request to an external server.