Who are you? Google? Facebook? Twitter? JanRain shares industry trends on distributed identities and social media platforms

You may not know this, but what distributed identity you decide to use and where you decide to use it says a lot about you—and a lot about the world of the Internet in general. I’m serious. Just think about it. Is Facebook Connect more popular? Is Google leading? What sort of traction does OpenID have overall? What about the promise of OAuth?

Wait. Am I the only one thinking about this kind of thing? Oh. Well, I know at least one other company that’s taking the time to dig into this dynamic: Portland-based JanRain.

With a view into more than 170,000 Web sites—thanks to their RPX product—perhaps no one has a better view of this segmented identity market than JanRain. And they’ve just published some interesting metrics on identity choice trends based on the decisions those social media types make.

What did they figure out? Well, here are some the key findings.

• Across all customers (multiple industries represented including entertainment, media, entertainment, retail, non-profit, and technology), Google accounted for 37% of logins, followed by Facebook at 27%, Yahoo! at 11% and Twitter at 6%.
• Results varied by industry, however. When aggregating a select sample of media companies for example, Facebook accounted for 38%, followed by Yahoo! at 30%, Google at 26% and Twitter at 7%.
• Login preferences also varied by geography, demographics, and over time as identity providers gain popularity and add features and capabilities. For example, six months ago Twitter hardly registered but now accounts for up to 25% of logins on some websites. For some websites in east Asia, greater than 60% of logins are from Yahoo!

See? I told you it was interesting.

In fact, one of the things I found most interesting things from my perspective? I would have never expected Twitter identities to be that high. And those other folks working on distributed identities would be wise to take note of what’s happening there. Because that’s pretty interesting. On a variety of fronts.

in the battle to own identity—which brings with it a rich dataset associated with that identity—Twitter has an interesting foothold. I mean, think of it. Twitter identities are used half as much as Yahoo! identities. Not only that but, in using Twitter, people are likely using a workflow that involves trusting Twitter as the entity that allows them to log into other sites.

That’s just plain old thought provoking.

But don’t just take my word for it. Why not take a look at the findings for yourself? JanRain has done all the work. So just head over to read more in their post “Data on Industry Trends in Social Media Platforms.”

You’ll be glad you did.

[HTML1]

Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy View all posts by Rick Turoczy