cross pond high tech

During the past five years, the ability to register and log in on websites with a social network or email identity has become increasingly prevalent. In fact, 90% of people have encountered social login before, and more than half of people use it. Because it makes the account creation and login process so much faster and easier and eliminates the need to remember yet another username and password, it’s no surprise that social login has become so popular.

But which networks are people most likely to choose? How do these preferences differ based on the type of sites people visit? We all use multiple social networks for different purposes. Facebook is generally where we interact with our close friends and family. LinkedIn is where we maintain our professional persona. Google+ lets us do both, by letting us organize our social graph and content we share into circles. We use Twitter to follow influencers, share opinions, and read about topics of interest. And Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft are our primary means of privately communicating with others via email.

For four years, Janrain has published quarterly reports to shed light on consumer preferences for social login, with data aggregated from the websites that use Janrain. The key takeaway, above all else, is that people want choice. In other words, there is not a single identity provider to rule them all.

Monthly active users were 241 million. The company added only 9 million more users since the last quarter — that is very weak progress. Only 1 million users were added in the U.S.
Worse, timeline views (a measure of how engaged users are with Twitter) actually declined sequentially.