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If your business depends on WiFi (e.g. Coffee Shop), this could potentially hurt business. Only ~50-70% of US Internet users use Facebook and that is dropping.

As a business owner I'd be concerned about alienation. Facebook is far from universal and many avoid it (especially the younger crowd).




Do you have a citation for that US usage statistic?


According to this often-quoted study, 71% of online adults used FB in September. http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2012/March/Pew-Internet-So...


What's interesting is that this study is an extrapolation (n=5112), but it suffers from selection bias in the sense that the people who would avoid using social networks would also like just hang up on the survey caller (I hung up on 4 this past month).

Add that to all the fluff-piece/marketroid sounding "survey results" like this:

"Read more about Facebook activity and Facebook “power users” in our report, Why most Facebook users get more than they give"

...pretty much make me wonder what questions they asked, and how much the prodded the recipients of the call to ask if they used social networking.

Surveys should state how many calls they placed successfully in order to achieve the (n) of respondents. That's information that's being thrown out.


A hybrid approach would be nice for your example: check in on Facebook to get online yourself, or go ask the barista for the WiFi password


More likely: there will be no hybrid approach and you'll see a piece of paper tacked to the bulletin board: "House throwaway Facebook account login for those without an account."


Seriously? There IS a hybrid approach (read above comments). Ridiculous.


I've been in a coffee shop that does this. You can either set the password yourself or log in via facebook. Don't remember the exact workflow, but it's possible.


You can see the setting to enable this from the provider's point of view from the last screenshot on this post on Meraki's site: https://meraki.cisco.com/blog/2013/05/youll-like-this-cisco-...


The main thing here that I didn't realize is that it seems there is ALWAYS an option to skip checking in, either by clicking "Skip checkin" or by getting the code from the cashier.


Looks like there's a way to skip the checkin with a code that you get from the business.




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