Unsharing
Is seamless sharing the end of sharing? Is Facebook malware? Are we afraid to click? Unsharing? http://eicker.at/Unsharing
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Like Button(s)
Facebook Like gets sharing granularity: hypersharing becomes (scarily) automatic; http://eicker.at/FacebookLikeButtons
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Gerrit Eicker
Forbes: “Facebook released a broad new set of social features Thursday that makes it easier for people to share a wide range of information about themselves. The new changes could boost the quantity of sharing and change the quality of information that people push through the social network. … [P]eople can now automatically share what music they’re listening to, what television or movies they’re watching, what news they’re reading and even what food they’re eating or what exercise they’re doing. It’s ‘frictionless’ to share in Mark Zuckerberg’s words. … The upshot of this is that Facebook is going way beyond enabling people to simply share their interests, to enabling people to share virtually anything they’re doing both online and offline. … The connection between sharing and actual purchases is one that Facebook is careful about, particularly after Beacon. But with all the sharing about products that people will inevitably do through the new changes, more traffic will be driven to companies’ sites where people can make purchases.”
AF: “Facebook’s annual f8 developer conference promised a lot of things today, but one cool subset of them takes the most popular interaction on the site and spins off variations. – We’re talking about the like button here. – Today, we click like when really a more specific action is involved but the thumbs-up is only option that exists. – So, get ready for buttons that could include: Want, Buy, Own, Listen to, Read, Eat, Watch, Work out… the open graph will also make people’s news feeds more customized than ever, requiring a more complex algorithm than the one that currently determines what people see on their home pages.- The algorithm that Facebook today calls EdgeRank becomes GraphEdge tomorrow.”
Mashable: “You can’t deny the success of Facebook’s Like button. Its popularity quickly skyrocketed; it took less than a month for the button to appear on more than 100,000 websites. Now it is a standard method for endorsing something on the social web. – But that’s exactly the problem – the Like button is an endorsement. … Facebook’s bet is that more people will click a button that says they’ve ‘Listened’ to a song or ‘Watched’ a video, rather than simply liking it. … It’s Facebook’s partners that will take this capability and turn it into applications that populate Facebook and their websites with these Gestures, though. That’s Facebook’s plan – to become the social layer on which the web is built. … The new Open Graph will change Facebook drastically.”
Forrester: “If there’s one thing Facebook is not afraid of, it’s change. … Facebook is laying claim to your life. Through its new Timeline feature that recaps in one fell swoop everything you’ve ever posted and lets you feature the highlights, along with its new apps that let you discover and share real-time experiences like watching movies and listening to music, Facebook is changing the social networking game. Of course you could argue that it was already acting as the online identity for many people, but this takes it to a whole new level.”
TC: “Unlike the Like button which gives you a way to explicitly share individual pieces of content, this Read plug-in (and presumably, Watch, Listen, etc, plugins) would allow third-parties to add a single button to their site to enable some of the automatic actions Facebook unveiled today. … To be clear, this button will be totally opt-in for users. And the button will also have ‘pause’ and ‘undo’ capabilities if a user decides they actually don’t want to share their activity automatically, Taylor said. – And the regular old Like button will continue to exist for users who still want to share specific pieces of content to Facebook.”
RWW: “While the focus of today’s Facebook announcements was the newTimeline profile, the Read, Watch, Listen media sharing apps have generated a lot of interest too. These so-called ‘social apps‘ haven’t been widely launched yet, but you can get a sense of what they will do by adding a couple of brand new newspaper social apps to your Facebook profile: The Guardian’s app and one from Washington Post. – Be forewarned though, with these apps you’re automatically sending anything you read into your Facebook news feed. No ‘read’ button. No clicking a ‘like’ or ‘recommend’ button. As soon as you click through to an article you are deemed to have ‘read’ it and all of your Facebook friends and subscribers will hear about it. That could potentially cause you embarrassment and it will certainly add greatly to the noise of your Facebook experience.”
Winer: “Facebook is scaring me – Yesterday I wrote that Twitter should be scared of Facebook. Today it’s worse. I, as a mere user of Facebook, am seriously scared of them. … This time, however, they’re doing something that I think is really scary, and virus-like. The kind of behavior deserves a bad name, like phishing, or spam, or cyber-stalking. … Now, I’m not technically naive. I understood before that the Like buttons were extensions of Facebook. They were surely keeping track of all the places I went. … People joke that privacy is over, but I don’t think they imagined that the disclosures would be so proactive. They are seeking out information to report about you. That’s different from showing people a picture that you posted yourself. If this were the government we’d be talking about the Fourth Amendment. … One more thing. Facebook doesn’t have a web browser, yet, but Google does. It may not be possible to opt-out of Google’s identity system and all the information gathering it does, if you’re a Chrome user. – PS: There’s a Hacker News thread on this piece. It’s safe to click on that link (as far as I know).“
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Timeline
Facebook’s Timeline: the story of our lives – and the perfect emotional advertising base; http://eicker.at/FacebookTimeline
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “Introducing Timeline – Tell your life story with a new kind of profile.”
Facebook: “Since the beginning of Facebook, your profile has been the place where you tell your story. … Over time, your profile evolved to better reflect how you actually communicate with your friends. Now you can can share photos of what you did last weekend, and updates about how you feel today. … Imagine if there was an easy way to rediscover the things you shared, and collect all your best moments in a single place. – With timeline, now you have a home for all the great stories you’ve already shared. They don’t just vanish as you add new stuff. … Timeline is wider than your old profile, and it’s a lot more visual. The first thing you’ll notice is the giant photo right at the top. This is your cover, and it’s completely up to you which of your photos you put here. … If important parts of your story aren’t included on your timeline, you can go back to when they happened and add them. – Or go to your private activity log. This is where you’ll find everything you shared since you joined Facebook. Click on any post to feature it on your timeline so your friends can see it, too. … Now, you and your friends will finally be able to tell all the different parts of your story – from the small things you do each day to your biggest moments. What will you create? We can’t wait to find out.”
RWW: “The biggest announcement at Facebook’s f8 event in San Francisco today was a radical new profile design. Called Timeline, the new design turns your profile into a colorful, easily searchable timeline of your entire life – at least the parts of it on Facebook. The Timeline won’t go live until a few weeks, but you can set it up as a developer preview by following these instructions. This is a ‘Developer Release‘ version of Timeline, so it may be a little buggy.”
GigaOM: “‘Timeline is a completely new aesthetic for Facebook,’ Zuckerberg said. … Timeline and all its features will be viewable from any type of mobile device, Zuckerberg said, which may indicate the app is built with HTML5. … The new interface is aimed at making it much easier to get a full picture of a person by seeing more about them than just their most recent updates, Zuckerberg said. … Each user can customize his or her own Timeline, which will make each individual profile more personalized than Facebook profiles have been in the past. … Users often grumble about even the smallest of changes Facebook makes to its interface, so it will certainly be interesting to watch how the response to Timeline plays out.”
pC: “The Timeline redesign will likely be jarring to Facebook’s famously change-averse users, but Zuckerberg and Facebook director of product management Chris Cox said that the idea was to allow people to create virtual scrapbooks of their lives through Facebook. Users will be able to sort their Timelines by certain pieces of content, such as clicking on button that will display all the photos taken of you in the last year. The new Timeline will be rolling out over the next several weeks, and it will be the home for a new set of social applications.”
Mashable: “Timeline, a major re-imagining of user profiles that allows users to build what’s essentially a visual scrapbook of everything they’ve done on the site. – CEO Mark Zuckeberg showed off the new features in his keynote at the company’s f8 conference. It algorithmically organizes everything you’ve done on Facebook — from post photos to change relationship status to check in – and also allows users to fill out a ‘Way Back’ section to add details that are omitted or pre-date the social network.”
Mashable: “The Evolution of the Facebook Profile in pictures…”
TC: “Trying to display all of this content was a major design challenge, Zuckerberg noted. How do you do it all on a single page? Well, all of your recent content is shown in a new grid-view. But as you go back in time, it’s more about summarizing your content to display the most important content. The farther back you go, the less you see – it’s just the key moments. ‘This is the magic of how Timeline works,’ Zuckerberg said.”
pC: “The recent consumer trend has, indeed, been toward more personal sharing and transparency. And Facebook has been working to improve privacy controls around that. But there are also some folks growing unsettled by Zuckerberg’s share-everything mantra, wondering whether Facebook ever stops to question the inevitability of the movement. And are we already witnessing the first few signs of consumers’ social networking fatigue?”
Mashable: “Facebook Timeline sounds like a good idea. It’s your life, organized and summarized for public consumption – or as public as you want to make it. … I don’t know if anyone is ready to trust Facebook’s algorithm to decide what to show and hide as the Timeline grows. Up top is full of minutiae. Down below, it’s an outline. But what Facebook deems important: – a birth, first steps, new job – may only be the highlights… With Timeline, and to a certain extent Open Graph, Mark Zuckerberg is once again racing forward to the next big thing. Let’s hope that he doesn’t inadvertently leave his users behind.”
GigaOM: “Now Facebook isn’t doing this just to help us cherish our memories. The more data it has and the more it understands what has emotional meaning to us, the better it can target us with ads. By letting us preserve the things, activities and apps that matter to us, it gives Facebook an even better way to tailor ads that demand a higher rate from advertisers. … But Timelines can also be an opportunity to create recommendation tools for users to suggest products they might like based on their tastes and interests. … Perhaps most fundamentally for Facebook, Timeline will give people a new reason to go into oversharing mode. … This move to organize past activity is increasingly what Facebook needs to do, I think, as it exploits the opportunities in its own timeline. It is further exploring the opportunities in the future, by helping people better discover what to do from their friends.”
TC: “How To Enable Facebook Timeline Right This Second – Fortunately, enabling Timeline a bit early isn’t too difficult – but it’s not at all straight forward, either. … You probably don’t want to do this unless you’re actually a developer. Expect bugs. … Here’s how to do it…“
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: Sharing Privacy
Facebook follows Diaspora, Google Plus: Making it easier to share with who you want; http://eicker.at/FacebookSharingPrivacy
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “Today we’re announcing a bunch of improvements that make it easier to share posts, photos, tags and other content with exactly the people you want. You have told us that ‘who can see this?’ could be clearer across Facebook, so we have made changes to make this more visual and straightforward. The main change is moving most of your controls from a settings page to being inline, right next to the posts, photos and tags they affect. Plus there are several other updates here that will make it easier to understand who can see your stuff (or your friends’) in any context. Here’s what’s coming up, organized around two areas: what shows up on your profile, and what happens when you share something new. … These changes will start to roll out in the coming days. When they reach you, you’ll see a prompt for a tour that walks you through these new features from your homepage. In the meantime, you can read more about the upcoming changes from the links throughout this post. We’ll look forward to your feedback on all of this. – Taken together, we hope these new tools make it easier to share with exactly who you want, and that the resulting experience is a lot clearer and a lot more fun.”
WSJ/ATD: “Facebook Makes Sharing More Granular (Hmm … Where Have We Heard That Pitch Before?) – Facebook isn’t borrowing the greater Google+ anatomy, like ‘Circles’ of friends and a mix of asymmetrical and mutual relationships. – Instead, Facebook is making a huge number of tweaks to its profile design, many of them aimed at addressing common user complaints. – This launch seems likely to ruffle Facebook users’ notoriously sensitive feathers given its little tweaks affect so many parts of the Facebook experience. But at least based on the press briefing, it’s not obvious that any one change will be controversial or dramatic.”
NYT: “No doubt the company also wants to diminish the possibility of legislation, investigation or litigation stemming from complicated or confusing privacy settings. And with mounting competition from other social networking sites, namely Google+, which emphasizes more compartmentalized communications to different sets of friends and acquaintances, Facebook is also keen to keep its customers’ trust. … Whether users will find the changes more inviting or simpler remains to be seen – as does whether they will opt to be more or less private. Facebook declined to share statistics on its users’ current privacy settings.”
TC: “So what changed? The obvious answer is Google+. Facebook’s response to my assertion was that Facebook wished it could have built these features in the time since Google+ launched, but that work on these changes actually began around six months ago. Which is probably half true. Facebook knew Google was going to be launching a social network that would try to underscore all of its flaws — note how many of these features are already live on Google+ — so it preemptively started working to fix the things that annoy people about Facebook. – Whatever the case, these are all good changes, and they make Facebook better.”
VB: “The features sound a lot like the features that appear in Google’s latest social network Google+. Rather than sequester the privacy settings on a separate settings page away from the actual action on the site, Facebook is moving its privacy and sharing features straight to the main page. It removes a lot of the hassle of having to jump to different pages to tweak privacy controls.”
GigaOM: “And although Facebook executives have dismissed Google+ as a non-threat, Facebook has certainly showed a renewed zest in shipping new products and features in the weeks since Google’s social network launched. As my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote recently, ‘It seems clear that the competition is keeping Facebook awake at night — which may be a good thing.‘ As Facebook and Google duke it out for consumer loyalty, they’re both bringing their best efforts to the table as quickly as possible — and the real winners will be the millions of social media users across both platforms.”
IF: “The changes may reduce the volume of content that is unwittingly overshared, and help users protect themselves from being associated with objectionable content against their will. The end result could be an increase in confidence in Facebook privacy that leads users to be comfortable sharing more, which could in turn increase engagement with the site. … Privacy has been Facebook’s biggest problem to date. A lack of confidence in the site’s privacy settings has scared away new users, frustrated existing users, and kept people from sharing more sensitive content. If Facebook can combine technological and design solutions with reassurance that users are in control of their online presence, it could leave its troubles behind and move towards making users happy rather than preventing them from getting angry.”
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Privacy VIII.
Facebook: You need to explicitly choose to share [address, mobile number] before [3rd parties] can access; http://eicker.at/24
Gerrit Eicker
Privacy vs. Publicity?
Boyd: Neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both; http://eicker.at/Privacy
Gerrit Eicker
WikiLeaks Paranoia
First positive effect for privacy. NYT: The Defense Department is scaling back information sharing; http://eicker.at/Paranoia
Gerrit Eicker
Path
The personal network: Path offers photo sharing with a personal network limited to the 50 closest friends; http://eicker.at/Path
Gerrit Eicker 08:39 on 21. November 2011 Permalink |
Facebook: “Early Results: The Open Graph and Music – Since f8, people have shared their listening activity more than 1.5 billion times with their friends using the music apps that have integrated the Open Graph. As a result, some of our biggest music developers have more than doubled their active users, while earlier-stage startups and services starting with a smaller base have seen anywhere between a 2-10x increase in active users. … Open Graph Best Practices – As you think about how to integrate with the Open Graph in music or any other category, here are some things many of these successful apps have in common: Socially connected users. With a base of users who are able to share your content with their friends from day one, you’re set up to double down on the social experience. – Experiences are social by design. Once you have connected users and have clearly set the expectation up front that they will be in a social experience, you benefit from an increased volume of sharing and virality for your app through News Feed, Ticker and Timeline. – Content being shared has lasting value. Beyond the immediate distribution benefits in channels like Ticker and News Feed, think about the aggregations and patterns your app can represent on Timeline to bring long-term value to a user and their friends who will revisit and reflect on it over the years.”
CNET: “How Facebook is ruining sharing – I’m afraid to click any links on Facebook these days. … [I]t’s because the slow spread of Facebook’s Open Graph scheme is totally ruining sharing. … If your friends are using an app like The Guardian or The Washington Post’s new Social Reader, you’ll get an intercept asking you to authorize the original site’s app so that you can read the story. And, of course, so that every story you read will start being shared automatically on Facebook, thanks to the magic of Open Graph! … So, publishers and Facebook in particular really, really want you to click those little Add to Facebook buttons so that everything you read, watch, listen to, or buy will get shared to friends who also authorize the app and share to friends who also authorize the app and so on and so on into eternity and hopefully riches. It’s all just part of the plan. … [H]urting sharing is a disaster for a social network. Sharing is the key to social networking. It’s the underlying religion that makes the whole thing work. ‘Viral’ is the magic that every marketing exec is trying to replicate, and Facebook is seriously messing with that formula. Plus, it’s killing the possibility of viral hits by generating such an overwhelming flood of mundane shares. … Sharing and recommendation shouldn’t be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing… I hope publishers will see that conscious sharing is better than passive sharing, and that content delivery is better than app delivery. I also hope that you, sweet social networker, will do your part to keep Facebook pure of trickster links, intercepts, and passive floods of sharing. … Hopefully, if enough of us demonstrate that we don’t want our lives to be Open Graph open books, this will all just go away.”
RWW, Kirkpatrick: “Why Facebook’s Seamless Sharing is Wrong – Facebook recently instituted a new program that makes it easy for 3rd party websites and services to automatically post links about your activity elsewhere back into Facebook and the newsfeeds of your friends. It’s called Seamless Sharing (a.k.a. frictionless sharing) and there’s a big backlash growing about it, reminiscent of the best-known time Facebook tried to do something like this with a program called Beacon. The company has done things like this time and time again. – Critics say that Seamless Sharing is causing over-sharing, violations of privacy, self-censorship with regard to what people read, dilution of value in the Facebook experience and more. CNet’s Molly Wood says it is ruining sharing. I think there’s something more fundamental going on than this – I think this is a violation of the relationship between the web and its users. Facebook is acting like malware. … Violation of reasonable user expectations is a big part of the problem. When you click on a link – you expect to be taken to where the link says it’s going to take you. There’s something about the way that Facebook’s Seamless Sharing is implemented that violates a fundamental contract between web publishers and their users. … ‘I’m afraid to click any links on Facebook these days,’ says CNet’s Molly Wood. That’s one of the world’s top technology journalists talking; even she seems unclear on how the system works and would rather just avoid the entire thing. … I don’t know why the world’s leading designers on social media user experience would have made something as creepy feeling as the way this new seamless sharing was instituted, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s because behind the scenes Facebook is built by arrogant young people living charmed lives and sure they know what’s best for the rest of us. … I think Facebook ought to put a greater emphasis on acting in good faith and helping its users make informed decisions, in line with their reasonable expectations, as the company seeks to experiment with building the future of media.”
TC: “Facebook and the Age of Curation Through Unsharing – Facebook’s Open Graph is ushering in a monumental shift in how we curate what we share. Curation used to mean opting in to sharing. … Facebook’s Open Graph is ushering in a monumental shift in how we curate what we share. Curation used to mean opting in to sharing. … Users still expect to have to actively share something in order for it to reach their audience. That’s no longer true. Instead we’ll need to learn to filter out the noise in reverse, opting out when we don’t want to share instead of opting in when we do. That’s a huge behavioral realignment that will take time and won’t come easy. … Until we have both learned to unshare and have the capability to do so, this will indeed be the dark age of curation. But we have the power to set the norms. Go read a ton of articles using a responsible app, unshare from the Ticker each one you wouldn’t recommend, and explicitly post links to the news feed to those you think are must-reads. If you see low-quality content shared to the Ticker, tell your friends to utilize the unshare button. – This isn’t natural. Often the best product design is translating existing behavior patterns to new mediums. But the proliferation of content, in both volume and access, requires a brand new conception of sharing and curation. Together we can bring about a golden age.”
RWW, MacManus: “Facebook Hasn’t Ruined Sharing, It’s Just Re-Defined It – Facebook’s new frictionless sharing features are ‘ruining sharing,’ according to a thought provoking article by CNET’s Molly Wood. In response, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick argued that Facebook’s seamless sharing is badly implemented and flat out ‘wrong.’ – Both made great points, but ultimately I don’t believe that frictionless sharing is a bad concept. What’s more, I disagree that it has ruined sharing. What Facebook has done is re-define sharing. I think it was an ingenious move and I predict that soon Facebook’s seamless sharing will be the norm. … It’s really up to Facebook to make sure that I, and millions of others, do get used to it. Especially, since this form of sharing is about to go viral. Let’s look at Instapaper, as an example of an app that may soon have frictionless sharing. … That’s not to belittle the very real concerns about over-sharing and privacy, as stated eloquently by Molly and Marshall. But Facebook has identified the immense value in tapping into media consumption patterns and, in frictionless sharing, it has found an ingenious way to capture that data. – Now Facebook’s challenge is to convince its users that some of that value is for the end user. Frictionless sharing is scary, there’s no doubt about it. It’s also not ideally implemented right now. So Facebook has work to do, both on the implementation and to show people the benefits of this new form of sharing.“