As part of an upcoming TypePad homepage redesign, I wanted to know how many people are using Facebook, Twitter and OpenID to log in to TypePad.
I originally published these findings on the internal company blog in September, but due to the amount of interest in my last blog post about user authentication, I'm republishing them here.
Currently TypePad allows for OpenID log in via a wide variety of services.
To find out which services people are using to log in, I contacted Jonathan March, Six Apart's Data Architect. I found out that while we don't track every log in specifically, we can get a very rough estimate by looking for a URL in a user's ID. Though the data is a bit out of date, I think it is still very useful.
Users by Provider (active in the past two months)
OpenID* users by Provider (active in the past two months)
* Technically the two of the largest providers aren't actually using OpenID. Twitter uses OAuth and Facebook has a proprietary system, Facebook Connect. Check out Ben Ward's awesome blog post for more about the user experience of OpenID and OAuth.
From this rough data we can see that while a majority of people are using the TypePad log in, a good portion are also using Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo - in that order.
What about sign up?
The previous graphs are based on data about users who have LOGGED IN in the past few months. What about new users - users who have SIGNED UP recently? Luckily Jonathan thought of this and followed up with data and graphs on the growth of alternative authentication providers. The results are a bit shocking.
User sign ups between 2 and 3 months ago (June 28 to July 28)
User sign ups between 1 and 2 months ago (July 28 to Aug 28)
User sign ups in the past month (Aug 28 to Sept 28)
OpenID user sign ups by provider by week
Umm... wow. That's a huge amount of growth in new users signing up via alternative providers!
A lot of this growth probably has to do with the log in page itself. TypePad has been continually redesigning their log in page as well as the blog comment form to encourage people to use OpenID and specifically Facebook and Twitter. Whatever the cause, it appears that users are increasingly using alternative authentication to register for TypePad and are choosing Facebook above other services.
While this data is very rough, it helped with our upcoming TypePad homepage redesign. As part of the new homepage, we are including a sign up form. The new sign up form is simple - only an email address and password are required. However, there is also a button to "Register with Facebook."
