I can still remember a time when people would tell me that OpenID and Google would definitively be the centralized ID of the web.  Other people would say there was no use to even having a sort of central identification.  And nearly every person would laugh if I insinuated that Facebook had the best shot of becoming the profile that defines a person on the web.  Those days are long gone, and today while hitting up a Second Cup coffee I noticed that they offered free wi-fi for logging in with your Facebook account.  I take a look at why they would choose Facebook.

Ubiquity

Facebook’s population has been exploding since its inception in 2007 and is now nearing 500 million users.  Facebook Connect is available on most sites that require a login and Facebook Games are one of the most popular past times on the web.  The web’s most popular photo site is Facebook as well.  People know Facebook, and penetration in developed countries is extremely high.  So when Second Cup wants to get a little information about their customer in exchange for the free wi-fi, it’s a no brainer to include Facebook Connect and ask their users to sign up with one click.

Technology

Facebook has been working to perfect it’s Facebook Connect technology for over a year now, and it’s not a fairly painless process for websites that want to integrate FB IDs into their site.  Their new Social Plugins idea, as part of the new open graph initiative, got 100,000 developer implementations in only a week.  When Second Cup needed to figure out how to get users to log in with Facebook Connect and then access some of their information, it was far from a custom implementation: Facebook offers this service free to thousands of developers every day.

The Cool Factor

Facebook is cool.  Kids use it as the hub of their social life, so much so that some only attend parties to take photos, post them to Facebook and leave early.  Celebrities and big brands promote themselves on Facebook Fan Pages, and people use Facebook to show their affinity for passionate causes.  Using Facebook means you are ‘in’, and while that circle of ‘in’ is growing a bit too rapidly to remain exclusive, it’s a must have.  For that reason, Second Cup looks that much more hip when they offer you the ability to use Facebook to get free wi-fi.

Price

Free.  Facebook offers these kinds of integration technologies for free.  This is the kind of service that specialized consulting companies would offer years ago for $50,000 and call it a bargain.  They’d pitch it as “an inclusive authentication and identification system that integrates with your current technology” and companies would buy in at $50,000 and think it was a steal.  Facebook (and Google) offer services like this for free, contingent on you integrating yourself.

Promotion

Second Cup asks users to sign up when they use Wi-Fi because they want to be able to connect with those users at a later date.  What way to better ping someone than through their Facebook account?  The integration with Facebook gives Second Cup access to a user profile more valuable than an email address: Facebook integration gives Second Cup basic access to interests, age, ID and more.  Second Cup can also send an email to users through Facebook, so while Second Cup doesn’t know the email address itself it can still address its audience by email.