A few days ago, many people were surprised when their news feeds became inundated with what their friends were listening to on Spotify, a streaming music service. Spotify changed their login system to use Facebook and added the ability to have your music piped to your Facebook wall. Now unless you already had a Spotify account, you can only sign up for Spotify with your Facebook credentials. Meaning, no Facebook account, no Spotify. I find this interesting.
Facebook has become so ubiquitous that 3rd party businesses see requiring a FB account to log into their service. They’re gambling that almost anyone they’d want to have probably uses Facebook. If Spotify required a Pinterest account to login, people would be confused (especially Spotify’s male audience). Pinterest is still a niche platform. However, it’s just assumed that everyone has a Facebook account. It shows that our lives really are moving to Facebook. Spotify said, on the topic of switching to Facebook’s login,
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.
It seems that all the services we use are headed the way of a “social experience”. Everything wants to be part of our life stream, piped to all our friends and family. Facebook has become the ultimate keeper of this stream, so anyone who wants to be a part of it needs to go through them. What else is going to plug into our Facebook account? What if the GPS in your car let you sign in with your FB account and share where you are? Or if restaurants had little computers at the table that let you share what you ordered? Or how about a toilet that… ok let’s not think about that one. For better or worse, Facebook is here to stay and businesses are going to find some interesting (and creepy) ways to leverage that.
