Facebook Connect Fail

To start off 2010 I quit a few things that I thought were taking up too much of my time. The first thing I quit was PHP which I blogged about yesterday. The second thing I quit which, I did not blog about but, I will now, because of recent events, is Facebook.

I quit Facebook not because it was an addiction but because I decided I didn’t need it. Now unfortunately I can’t completely quit Facebook because I’m a developer and the Facebook platform is undeniably powerful. I have removed my personal account but, created a new account for testing. However as I just recently discovered its going to be harder to quit Facebook than I thought.

You may be thinking its because my friends have no way of contacting me now (for some that is true and I will miss you) or because I won’t receive event invitations (99% of the time this is a good thing) but, its actually my past laziness which has put me in an awkward position.

Most of the new services I have signed up for in the last 6 months offer the option to sign up with Facebook Connect. It’s so easy! Just click on Facebook Connect and you’re ready to go. Well yea… but what happens when you deactivate your Facebook account like I have? I am now locked out of some of my favorite services like posterous.com.

Facebook actually has a system to deal with this situation where Facebook sends you an email when you deactivate your account with links to all the services you signed up to with Facebook Connect. By clicking on each of the links you can re-claim your account. In theory this is a great idea but how many developers really care about this use case? Do they really expect all their users to be as crazy as me? No, and thats why of all the services I am signed up to only foursquare.com had a way for me to re-claim my account.

So if you see me sign on to Facebook today just pretend nothing happened.