Frontdoor.com, HGTV’s foray into the real estate search space, now lets you sign in to the site (sort of) with your Facebook account.
It’s a great idea in theory, I’m all for lowering the friction points that exist to interact with any site. Sign up processes, while necessary, are often clumsy and time consuming as a user. Letting me use one of existing online profiles through Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect or even OpenID makes that step a breeze. One click and I’m in.
Use of universal logins are in their infancy for sure. OpenID is gaining ground but you may as well use Navajo on your site as far as mainstream consumers are concerned. So kudos to Frontdoor for taking a step in the right direction. Their product is clearly aimed at the middle of the bell curve consumer rather than the bleeding edge search nerds, so having it connect to Facebook is definitely a smart move.
But unfortunately, in its current state, it doesn’t go far enough. Or anywhere for that matter. As far as I can tell logging in to Frontdoor with my Facebook account (while it was a snap) didn’t really seem to allow me to do much.
In fact, beyond pulling in my avatar at the top of the page, I couldn’t figure out what it did at all.
Personally, I’d love for it to integrate more deeply with the MyFrontdoor account and allow me to share and save properties or save my searches. Right now it seems I still have to sign up for a separate account and even then the two aren’t even linked.
Now it could be this is a limitation of the API. But it would be great if you could integrate your profiles on other social networks into search tools like Frontdoor. If you could post found properties to my profile or to groups of friends inside my existing social graph, for example. How about allowing me to identify promote my own house for sale (if it were) to my wall. How cool would that be?
I like where Frontdoor is going with this. Hopefully we’ll see more to come soon.
