Location

260-051, Owen G. Glenn Building

Start Date

12-15-2014

Description

In an attempt to leverage the profile information people maintain on social network platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, many web sites and online services encourage users to register and log-in using these profiles. Despite the common adoption of this feature by online services, it is not clear whether they should integrate with social network platforms. On one hand, integration might help the online service recruit and retain users by reducing the friction associated with registration and by creating a more personalized and sociable environment. On the other hand, integration might repel users who would prefer that their actions on the service not be visible to their social networks or tracked by the platform operator (e.g., Facebook). We study whether social network platform integration is valuable to an online service by examining the implementation of the “Login with Facebook” feature by a social 3D virtual world.

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Dec 15th, 12:00 AM

Is Social Network Platform Integration Valuable for an Online Service? A Randomized Field Experiment and Archival Data Analysis

260-051, Owen G. Glenn Building

In an attempt to leverage the profile information people maintain on social network platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, many web sites and online services encourage users to register and log-in using these profiles. Despite the common adoption of this feature by online services, it is not clear whether they should integrate with social network platforms. On one hand, integration might help the online service recruit and retain users by reducing the friction associated with registration and by creating a more personalized and sociable environment. On the other hand, integration might repel users who would prefer that their actions on the service not be visible to their social networks or tracked by the platform operator (e.g., Facebook). We study whether social network platform integration is valuable to an online service by examining the implementation of the “Login with Facebook” feature by a social 3D virtual world.