Social Network Features In Forum Software

[ZiNgA BuRgA]

(05-16-2012 04:30 AM)brad-t Wrote:  It's not important how much of the world uses Facebook, but how much of your target demographic uses Facebook -- or, at least, is comfortable integrating their Facebook with their forum profile? On my community I would imagine the number is fairly high versus a community like this full of technically minded people where there is a general negative sentiment towards Facebook.

(Also, Facebook has over 901 million active users -- even if we were conservative and cut this number in half, that is more than 10% of the world. And 10% of the world is a big enough number to care, anyway.)

This is irrelevant to a forum software, which has to cater for all audiences, not just the non-technical crowd.
I don't keep track of how many accounts Facebook has nowadays, but the world population is over 7 billion, so 450 million is certainly a lot less than 10%.

Again, 3rd party integration should be kept to an absolute minimum, completely removed if possible.  You don't know the state of the site in the future - if Google somehow manages to pull everyone off to G+, well, there goes a lot of the appeal of your efforts.
Or perhaps you've only considered western audiences - I would imagine places like China don't particularly use Facebook (for that matter, a lot of the video sites included with MyBB too, which is why I again believe it shouldn't be there) - and they have a lot more than 10% of the world's population.