Hi, i am in the process of finishing off my sign up form on my site. I like most people here, would not use a social network to sign up to any website... i'd rather use an email address, HOWEVER, some people do use them. So, i am just about to start integrating the Facebook and Twitter Sign Up APIs into my site, however i have a few questions. 1 - how do these work, what is the general process involved (what happens when they choose once of these methods) 2 - once a user signs up with one of the apis, is their info (such as first name, last name, email address) pulled from the Facebook or Twitter database, then saved in my database 3 - if i need to display some of the users details on my site (such as first name), where will the site be pulling the details from, my database or the social network database Thanks in advance to any help you can give on any of the above questions
Hello, I will try and answer your question. 1. When a user signs in using and of the social networks providers, it pull their already existing details such as user username etc 2. Saving the details fetched from the social networks into your database is up to you. So if you want to save the details into your own database, you can do that through your coding. 3. For me, the best route to go in displaying the details pulled from the social network is to save the details first in your database, and then display it on your site from your database. Thanks
Hi thanks for your reply... quick question in relation to your answer for point 3: If we pull the users information from the social network into our site database, and then the user updates or changes some of their info on the social network, the information would then be inaccurate.
I know about Facebook where you can ask the user for access token. Once the user grants you access token, then you can query the user's information on Facebook to get fresh content about the user. I don't think you want rely on any social network for information to use on your website. Let me know what exactly, the system you are trying to build and maybe i can give ideas on how best to achieve it. Thanks
May be a little off topic, but what if a user wants to sign-up but doesn't use social media? Will you lose that user? This is one of the key reasons why I'm not really using social media to sign users up. Having 2 separate sign-ups so that users can sign-up with Facebook/Twitter OR sign up using their email address is probably a good solution, but then isn't this going to be a ball ache with data protection laws? If a user signs up with Facebook/Twitter for example, the user can simply revoke access to their data, but if they login with their email address you have to script in a way for them to remove their data. My question right back to you would be is it worth the lines and lines of code to get a minimal amount of data from their social media accounts?
you need to signup as a developer then get your API key and secret and get Facebook php sdk from git-hub and then customize it to integrate.
Thanks for all of the replies... i have decided that i won't be using social sign up now as i have read a lot of articles over the weekend which have influenced my decision. Have a read of this if you have time, as i this post hits the nail on the head. http://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/
Wow, this figure is extremely high. I don't quite understand why though... They can't remember their username and/or password logging in via Facebook/Twitter, well wouldn't this be the same if they logged in directly? Not so sure on the problem here, they forgot their username/password anyway so wouldn't this have happened regardless? As for using Facebook/Twitter to login, everybody has their own opinions, while it may benefit some, it may not benefit you. There's not much point in integrating such methods if the return is little. Me personally have looked into integrating those systems, but the negatives far outweigh the positives. I like to organize my login systems and have customized methods and while it is possible to do this with social media, I don't see the long-term benefits.
I agree... i don't think someone is not going to sign up to your site, just because they can't use their social media account. The main reason i am removing it is because i feel the more info you present to a user at the login stage, the more annoying it may be for them sub consciously, and the registration page would look too busy...