Facebook Launches New Registration Sign Up Tool

Posted on December 16th, 2010 1:44 Pm

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Last week we revealed that Facebook was testing a new registration social plugin, and today that feature was officially announced.

The registration plugin is simply a way to automatically generate a registration form and reduce friction during the sign up process. Ultimately all registration forms will have a Facebook-like design but will have much of the data pre-poulated. Most of what was announced this morning was something we previously covered, however there are a few things which we didn’t know about in our previous update.

Implementation of this feature still requires having a developer who knows a little bit of back-end programming. As described in the user registration documentation, the data entered by the form will be sent back as a signed request, with an oAuth token included. You can then enter all the data provided by the form into your back-end database, and continue moving the user through the flow, with the session essentially being generated by Facebook.

The key benefits here are two-fold: registration forms will be auto-populated and hence the sign up process will be quicker and all your users can now quickly login with Facebook while you still gain access to the user data. Rather than using any complex javascript authentication or old Facebook Connect code, you can get up and running quickly. You can view the full details here. One thing that would be interesting would be for Facebook to take this by the next level by handling all authentication issues and provide non-technical people with a simple back-end for managing their users. I’m sure that’s much further down the road.