Account creation is such a pain. That’s why Zoho, the browser-based, enterprise-focused productivity suite that competes with Google Apps, today rolls out integration with Facebook Connect, turning the ubiquitous social network into a new market for their product. Here’s why resellers should care.
Facebook Connect is the method by which you can use a Facebook account credentials to log into another site – YouTube and Digg support it, among many others. Of course, all your activity on the site gets syndicated automatically back to your Facebook feed. That’s what makes it perfect for Zoho.
Translation: You don’t need to create a Zoho account to take advantage of Zoho Apps if you have a Facebook account, and neither does anyone with whom you want to collaborate. Moreover, there’s a version of Zoho Apps that lives right in Facebook, so you don’t even have to leave the site.
Zoho already offers this kind of functionality with Google and Yahoo accounts, but neither of those have the same kind of everybody-and-their-mother levels of market penetration. Zoho resellers now have a whole wide social networking world of potential customers who already have a friend list full of potential collaborators and an existing login under their real name.
I’ve gone on the record as being skeptical of the business application of social networking. But if Zoho can wrap their already-strong SaaS applications offering around the familiar framework of Facebook, I may just have to revise my opinion.
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