It would certainly differentiate your service, but might also limit your user base unnecessarily
Limiting user base? I don't think it would hurt much. Half of internet users use Facebook. I think they have a good chance at giving better user experience by tying with Facebook.
Limiting user base? I don't think it would hurt much. Half of internet users use Facebook.
Even assuming that figure is true, why cut your potential user base in half right off the bat? And for those who are FB users, what do they do when they want to exchange files with non-FB users? The service will be unusable in such cases even for FB users, and sendrail ends up losing more transactions.
We also support hooking into your address book on your Mac, and are working on integrating your online email address book and ActiveDirectory into it. We're trying to cover every single contact mechanism out there so you don't have to worry about "finding the right tool" to send a file to someone -- we hope to make SendRail work for every single use case you encounter.
Even if they have cut their initial user base in half, it doesn't mean they will not add alternatives in the future. FB integration solves a whole lot of issues around auth and sign up and generally makes your life easier when prototyping things imho.
Half the internet may use Facebook, but how many people, in the target audience for this service, prefer to tie as little as possible to their Facebook account?
I know that if a third party service wants to tie to Facebook, I immediately say "No thanks".
If half of those internet users friends use facebook, this limits Sendrail to 1/4 of potential matches.
If half of those internet users' potential recipients of files are friends (colleagues, acquaintances, chat room contacts, etc may not be fb friends) that gets us to 1/8 of use cases as potentially solved with Sendrail, and Sendrail is only useful to Fb users 1/4 of the time.
Most people won't want to use a service that's useful only 1/4 of the time for a particular task, so this is far worse than a 50% reduction in potential users. This is how you get no users.
Limiting user base? I don't think it would hurt much. Half of internet users use Facebook. I think they have a good chance at giving better user experience by tying with Facebook.