Odd YouTube Banners Mislead In The Facebook/Google Identity War

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). → Learn More


Early this morning we got word of what sounded like a pretty major change for YouTube: some users are seeing banners inviting them to “Sign up for YouTube with your Facebook account!“.

That sounds a whole lot like YouTube is allowing users to skip having to create a Google account by letting them simply log in with their Facebook accounts, which would be a strange move strategy-wise. As it turns out, it’s simply a case of some questionable wording.

I’m not seeing the banner myself, but a YouTube spokesman says that clicking it will take you to the standard YouTube registration screen, where you fill out your information as usual. Once you’ve done that, your newly created YouTube/Google account will automatically be connected to Facebook via Facebook Connect, so that it pulls in your friends’ shared items. But you aren’t actually logging in using Facebook’s Single Sign-on feature, which is an important distinction.

And YouTube probably won’t be doing that any time soon — Facebook and Google are increasingly fighting over the future of identity on the web; accepting Facebook logins on YouTube would hurt Google’s cause and bring Facebook one step closer to becoming the web’s ubiquitous login standard.

That said, YouTube has been gradually integrating some Facebook Connect features since last summer, beginning with an autoshare feature in June 2009 and more recently allowing users to see what their friends have shared from YouTube to Facebook. In other words, YouTube is embracing Facebook’s sharing functionality, but it isn’t going all the way.

Thanks to Cole Turner for the tip

Bottom image via DidIKnow

Company: YouTube
Website: youtube.com
Launch Date: November 9, 2005
Funding: $11.5M

YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. YouTube is the leader in online video, sharing original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email. Everyone can watch videos on YouTube. People can see first-hand accounts of current events, find videos about their hobbies and interests, and discover the quirky...

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Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: January 2, 2004
Funding: $2.34B

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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