When people ask why people are concerned about real names rather than pseudonyms or talk of people not having to use a service, it’s all well and good, but as I’ve stated before there’s an underlying function creep going on and into that murky water comes Spotify.
The free music site recently struck a deal with Facebook, first of all this means more piddling about with Facebook settings, but there’s something really bad about this deal, if you’re not a Facebook user you won’t be able to signup for Spotify. No new accounts can be created unless you have a Facebook account.
Ah well what’s the problem, it’s free? Well no, you can pay for extra services with Spotify and even if you want to become a premium subscriber, you will still need a Facebook account to signup, which quite frankly is an absurd requirement.
Spotify aren’t the only people to have gone down this route, the virtual world Kitely still has the ridiculous Facebook requirement, whereas TechCrunch, the tech blog, still have Facebook comments. However at least on Facebook people can comment via AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts, although still not via Twitter. TechCrunch really should know better.
However when it comes to Spotify, this really is a completely ludicrous situation, they should not need Facebook accounts, especially when it comes to paying customers. What on earth are they thinking here? Linking with Facebook is all well and good, indeed an option to use a Facebook account makes sense but it may come as a surprise to some people, but there are plenty of people who don’t have a Facebook account and nor do they want one, forcing people to get one to use your service is quite frankly, seedy.
There’s an answer forum on the Spotify website which addresses the Facebook issue and highlights the absurdity of it loud and clear. First up we have Spotify employee Darren:
“Hey Guys thanks for your question, Unfortunately you will need a Facebook account to access Spotify from now on, unless you already have an account set up.
This does not stop you creating the Facebook account adding nothing to it and making it totally private as the Facebook account does not have to be actively used. ”
Well that’s just ludicrous, create an account on a social network that you won’t use to access a service you shouldn’t need to create an account on another service for, however it gets better when Spotify employee Andres comes to the forum:
“Hi all,
We wanted to follow up on this thread some more.
To us, this integration is all about creating an amazing new world of music discovery. As most of our users are already social and have already connected to Facebook, it seemed logical to integrate Spotify and Facebook logins. We already use Facebook as part of our backend to power our social features and by adopting Facebook’s login, we’ve created a simple and seamless social experience.
From this week, all new Spotify users will need to have a Facebook account to join Spotify. Think of it as like a virtual ‘passport’, designed to make the experience smoother and easier, with one less username and password to remember. You don’t need to connect to Facebook and if you do decide to, you can always control what you share and don’t share by changing your Spotify settings from the Preferences menu at any time.
We’re constantly trying new things, always looking for feedback and we’re always going to listen to our users, making changes based on this feedback wherever we can.
Andres
Spotify ”
I don’t even know where to start with this one, a virtual passport? This is getting surreal, Facebook is not a virtual passport and never will be a virtual passport. There’s nothing wrong with doing a deal with Facebook to allow Facebook users to use your service, in many ways it’s a smart move but it should never be the only ship in the port, companies should want to own their own customers.
I have no idea what Spotify are thinking of here by making Facebook the only ship in the port, but it’s an ill conceived and silly concept and one that they should be criticised for.
He says they are constantly trying new things, so within a year or so they should have their userbase pretty well fragmented across dozens of social media logins and engineers jumping ship en masse due to no directional insight among the management. Wow that sounds familiar.
Well there’s definitely something amiss with their announcements, it makes no sense to say this is to remove barriers when it places a big barrier to people signing up. These companies getting into bed with Facebook should be careful what they wish for.
The new things line was familiar, I was looking for a quote on that, I have heard that before.
Hi Ciaran,
As the CEO of Kitely I can promise you that alternatives to the Facebook login requirement are VERY high on our priority list. We know that this requirement is preventing a lot of people who wish to use our service from starting to do so and we want to remove that barrier to adoption as soon as we can.
Unfortunately, there are several things that we still need to implement before we implement alternative logins, such as our billing system (we have been providing free OpenSim hosting services for hundreds of regions for more than 6 months – we now host more than 1150 regions).
If we were to provide alternatives to Facebook logins before we can charge people we may get bankrupted by people creating more worlds than we can afford to host for free. Our other top priority items are also critical for our scalability and must be implemented before we remove the artificial requirement that is keeping user adoption at a level we can sustain for free with our current infrastructure.
If development continues as expected, we hope to implement billing by the end of November and roll out Facebook login alternatives about one month after that.
Hi IIlan, you’re much too polite! At least in your case building from the ground up there are mitigating circumstances for using Facebook, even if I don’t like it.
Your proposed billing model is one people have raised as wanting to see in Second Life, someone commented on a resource usage billing method a week or two ago on another blog post here, so it will be interesting to see how that works out when you are ready to move to billing.
Hi Ciaran,
I understand your aversion to using Facebook and we intend to make sure that you won’t be forced to do so to use Kitely. It’s just a matter of us making sure that our system can scale before we remove this artificial barrier that is helping us limit user adoption while keeping our beta open.
This current need to limit user adoption is very unfortunate but we have to face the reality of our limited financial resources so we can’t make this very frequently requested change before we start seeing money coming in.
Regarding billing, it will be up to Second Life veterans to decide whether they like our “get unlimited land pay for what you use” model and vote with their wallets. If we get enough people willing to pay for resource use instead of land maintenance then I’m sure Second Life will take note and work on updating their billing model accordingly. Nothing drives a big company to make drastic changes to their billing model more than seeing their most lucrative customers spend money elsewhere.
Thanks for the courteous replies Ilan, much appreciated. we should talk more at some point and do a blog post about your plans.
Hi Ciaran,
It will be my pleasure. Please send me an email once you’re ready and we’ll schedule some time for a call.
Well you certainly called this one…
http://allthingsd.com/20111011/spotify-bug-kept-users-logged-into-facebook-even-after-they-disconnected/