Scribd - the popular document sharing website is listed as one of the partner site on Facebook’s Instant Personalization page. Instant personalization is a great concept which allows a website to use your public information shared on Facebook  to serve a more personal experience on the other websites. The problem is in execution which I realized a few days back.

When I landed on scribd.com, an Instant Personalization notice greeted me from top of the page. As far as I remember, it was an opt-out notice. After a few minutes, I decided to download a document. Scribd wanted me to upload one before I could download something. [Weird policy] I decided to do it through my regular account. The username shown to me was rohit_mishra_35. I logged out and logged in back from my movingahead account. When I tried connecting my movingahead account with facebook, I was greeted by this message :

The Scribd account rohit_mishra_35 is already linked with your Facebook account and was created through Facebook Connect. If we unlink your Facebook account from rohit_mishra_35, you will no longer be able to access that account.

Please login to rohit_mishra_35 using Facebook Connect and set a password for that account. Then, you will be able to unlink your Facebook account, and link it to the currently logged in account movingahead.

[caption id=“attachment_102” align=“alignleft” width=“717” caption=“Scribd fb Instant Personalization”][/caption]

I probably made a mistake somewhere which led to this situation. However, I believe that Scribd should have asked me whether I already have a Scribd username before assigning me one based on Instant Personalization. If a website is using usernames, as Scribd does, I believe they are much better off using Facebook Login/Connect.

IP is suited for sites that are ready to completely depend on Facebook Login and not use their own usernames.