Facebook has been steadily introducing features that it says will ensure “frictionless sharing” on the platform. It started with the introduction of Timeline and then was followed closely by the launch of some 60 odd third party apps that share whatever it is you are reading, watching, listening to, etc, onto your Facebook Timeline.
This sounded great in theory but I’m not sure what the whole idea is for putting ALL I do on the Internet on my Facebook page. I recently clicked on a third party app and in the permissions window that popped up, it was asking me to give it rights to publish ALL my interactions on the site to my Facebook wall, automatically and without any further consent from me. Well, needless to say, I clicked cancel and ditched the app.
The latest feature from Facebook takes things a bit further by adding different app streams to the side bar of the Facebook wall. This means if you use Spotify or Rdio, you will see a stream of all the music you and your friends are listening to. Now, this is all good until it begins to get a bit intrusive.
Think about a situation where you are looking for some information concerning a medical condition you have and all that research gets dumped on your Facebook wall. Also, we all read that random awkward article that we would not want to be put on our public Facebook wall.
This has made it hard to control what content goes onto Facebook and what you share. Gone are the good old days of hitting the share button. So if all this sharing is all about social activity, how in the world will I see my friends posts if all I see is “So-and-so read this”? Facebook has been great but I think all this “frictionless sharing” is going a bit too far. What do you think?
