Sunday afternoon, coffee's gone cold, and I'm still poking around in the aftermath of F8. If you missed it, Facebook ran its developer conference last Wednesday and Thursday (April 30 and May 1) out in San Francisco, and buried under all the "Zuck says platform stability for the next decade" talk was a change I actually think matters: they're finally letting you use an app without handing over your whole digital identity first.
It's called Anonymous Login. The pitch is simple, you can try out an app connected to Facebook without it knowing who you are, and decide later whether to actually link your account. Alongside that, Facebook Login itself got trimmed down. New apps only ask for your name and profile photo by default now, instead of the old all-or-nothing wall of checkboxes for your email, your birthday, your friend list, your hometown, and whatever else a developer decided to bolt on because the API let them.
I want to be clear about why this is a bigger deal than it sounds. For the last few years the standard move for any halfway ambitious app, games especially, has been to gate the whole thing behind a Facebook permissions screen that reads like a EULA nobody's going to read. I've got a sudoku app on my phone right now that, last I checked, wanted my email, my friend list, and permission to post on my timeline before it would let me look at a 9x9 grid of numbers. I never granted it. I just play sudoku somewhere else. Multiply that by every dumb little utility app on the App Store and you start to see why "just give us everything up front" was such a bad default, and also why almost nobody bothered fixing it until now, because it worked fine for growth numbers even if it annoyed people like me.
So the fact that Facebook is dialing this back on its own, instead of getting dragged into it by regulators, is worth noting on its own terms. Whether it actually changes developer behavior is a different question. Permissions can still be requested incrementally as you use an app, which is smarter design, but it also means the nagging just gets spread out instead of removed. I'll believe the "quieter, more respectful" version of Facebook Login when I've gone a full month without some app asking me for my hometown to unlock a badge.
The other thing that stuck with me from the keynote coverage was Zuckerberg basically admitting, without quite using these words, that Facebook Home was a swing and a miss. If you remember, that was the Android launcher thing from last year that tried to turn your entire home screen into a Facebook feed. It landed with a thud, HTC First (the phone built around it) got a price cut to 99 cents within a month, and it's been quietly shelved ever since. This year's message was almost the opposite of that energy, less "we're taking over your phone," more "we're going to sit still and be reliable infrastructure for developers for a while." That's a genuinely different posture for a company that spent 2012 and 2013 throwing things at the wall.
I don't have a tidy verdict on any of this yet, and I'm suspicious of anyone who does four days out. Granular permissions and anonymous trial modes are good defaults, full stop, and I'd like to see them show up outside Facebook's ecosystem too, Google and Twitter both have the same all-or-nothing login problem baked into their APIs, and neither has announced anything close to this. But defaults are also just defaults. Developers can still ask for the moon on day two of using your app, and plenty will, because the incentive to know everything about you hasn't gone anywhere. Facebook didn't fix the incentive. It just made the polite version slightly easier to build and the rude version slightly more visible.
Anyway. Back to actual sudoku, on an app that doesn't need to know who my friends are.