Convenience or freedom of choice?

This morning one of my friends complained on Twitter because he did not understand why he had to rebuild his social graph all over again in Foursquare. He basically advocated for FacebookConnect to be everybody’s universal ID.

Reading this put me the hairs on end. FacebookConnect as a universal ID? Ouch! Then, I reflected for a while and I saw how attractive and convenient loading that kind of information in just one click is. But, do we want to do this for all products and applications?

Here is my take on this: convenience should not override freedom of choice. When dealing with sensitive data and ID, it is even more important to take that into account.

Extending how  we do not relate and behave the same way in all our real-life social communities (professional vs. personal vs. bridge club vs. football-team fan-club) there is no justified reason why we should mix our virtual communities. This will cause the following effects:

•      By default, you will bring your Facebook friends at once to each application community and, only after, you will manage the filtering, if ever. Most likely, the Facebook filtering already in place in your profile will not suit the social requirements of the application, leading to some knowledgeable users to create groups in Facebook for that specific application.
•      If only FacebookConnect-related people are potentially inter-connectable, it means that we cannot make virtual connections (friends) outside Facebook. Furthermore, it means that, at some point, we do not know if those application connections are there because you share interest in that software or products or just because it is something you brought with you and your FacebookConnect account.

These two social handicaps do not take into account the danger of making a single entity hold the power of controlling our IDs. Disserting on this topic could take a whole blog entry per se. I do not believe it is wise to make Facebook, or anyone, that powerful.

What about convenience? Well, maybe, at the end of the day, we should let people decide if they want to go towards a social nightmare anyway. I think that a FaceConnect button could be an optional feature if, and only if, those allowing its use on top of their social community explain well the advantages and disadvantages of doing so.

Clear consumer information should always be paramount!