Not Sharing Is Caring
slate.com
slate.com
"[...] his suitcase is on its way to Mombasa, where it will probably be pithed and resurrected in the service of some African cyber-Fagin. That's okay by Manfred — it only contains a statistically normal mixture of second hand clothes and toiletries, and he only carries it to convince the airline passenger-profiling expert systems that he isn't some sort of deviant or terrorist"
At what point is it going to be statistically abnormal to not be sharing the minutiae of your life in this way, and what are the consequences to anyone who wants to retain some level of privacy? Will they be required to maintain some sort of statistically-average social network profile, occasionally updating it with something plausible?
[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
The friend spam fad will recede eventually and become one of those iconic crazy things from the past that everyone shakes their head about. Kind of like the shoe fitting x-ray device: http://www.museumofquackery.com/devices/shoexray.htm
This doesn't mean that you're going to get inundated with meaningless shares. That would be a horrible user experience. In fact, Facebook put a lot of time and effort into making sure that is exactly what didn't happen. It's the very reason why timeline was built. It's why ticker was built. They did this because they want a place for the increased sharing to go, without degrading user experience.
But here's the really exciting part. Once all this data is in the graph, timeline and ticker will pale in comparison to what developers can do with all of this new, structured data. That is the really important thing here.
Implicit sharing is not so that you can get a notification every time someone listens to a song. It's so that a talented young developer can come along and create a beautiful application that visualizes all of your song listens, how it makes you similar or different from your friends.
Don't worry Farhad. Explicit sharing and taste isn't going away. I will still pay more attention to the link you posted of that song you love than the song that blips by in my ticker. I wouldn't criticize the new graph until its matured and we've seen the next generation of amazing apps that are going to be enabled.
What we have here is blatant disregard for user security. Facebook is clearly saying that if you don't like it... you can dig around fb (or the partner site/s) and attempt to find the settings that control these new functions.
If facebook even had the slightest care in the universe about user experience they would at least ask the user to opt-in first to use the features. Since when does one company decide what I want to share, and who I want to share it with?...I do not want every one of my fb friends to see what movie I watched or what music I'm listening to. Nor, would I give permission.
Spotify, for example, will happily announce to the world whatever you happen to be listening to, and there's no simple way to hit "mute". So you're going to need to build a separate "mute" button into every app, on every platform, and have enough trust that it will work ...
I hate to single you out, but the amount of blatantly unresearched, inaccurate statements in this discussion is really disappointing. This is a powerful, well-implemented (easy to opt-in/opt-out of any broadcasting on an app by app basis) feature.
This is no longer a great user experience and it's not longer a social network... No, this is without a doubt a media venture that will do anything to make their advertisers happy... at the expense of the users.
I wonder if you see your own contradiction? You had to go out of your way to make a point that users need to now attend the settings for every single product they use and maintain additional information. It seems that with every year things get more and more out of hand
Today, as an FB user I'm not happy. For one, I had to download a plug in for the new ticker (a news feed with in a news feed?) just to get rid of the annoyance. Tomorrow we will have to deal with a dozen more ticks.
You make a good point about the possibility of mining all this data, but I'm not sure I want to give it away. We (well, some of us), go to lengths to maintain separate online personas. Why do I care if Facebook knows what my most-played songs are? I can get that info from iTunes, etc.
They're going to need a strong pull (killer app, privacy controls, whatever) to get my data.
I want to share something with my friends because I think it might inspire them or make them happy. Or, in the case of news, let them know about important stuff that's happening in the world. They do the same thing when they share with me.
So to blindly share everything just creates a lot of noise. If everything is shared by default, you'll need to start sifting out the signal from the noise. Which is annoying because I trust my friends to only share stuff that's relevant.
We all love lolcats but know how to find them on our own.
Lol, I really like your comment! It sounds like it could be a great tagline for my web app, http://handpick.me
Just curious, how are you and your friends updating each other on what's big in the world today?
One positive with reducing friction is that it might be easier to find common ground with someone. But overall im not sure I like it- social grooming is a good thing
I really enjoyed having a persistent record of what I listened to for my own use and for finding new music.
However, I stopped using the service because, honestly, I'm not exactly proud of every song that makes it to my most-played list. LastFM let's you remove a song from your profile if I remember correctly, but it was easier to not share at all than to remove specific types of sharing.
Facebook has this problem times 100. I try and tell everyone I know that isn't technical that Facebook knows every website they've been on that has a like button on it (and then I make a serious face and say evverry site) most people have no idea. The idea that Facebook has this kind of info and is going to start "autosharing" makes me uncomfortable.
It would be very interesting for me if you might write up a few lines on "why", if you can.
Very few systems make it easy to manage multiple (and shifting) sharing relationships, so not sharing by default is the easiest thing to manage.
Nicely put, just like how we behave differently in front of our parents as compared to our peers.
Now Facebook wants to automatically share everything about you, essentially killing whatever privacy you had left on Facebook, and people applaud it.
Maybe not related (yet), but it does remind me of this quote:
"Freedom is lost to the sound of thunderous applause."
This is a great opportunity for Google put a spin on what Facebook is doing with all this, and say they are going the opposite direction, and instead of auto-sharing everything about you like Facebook does, Google+ allows you to choose exactly what you share and to who.
Facebook's features may seem cool today, but they have the potential to turn into the biggest PR disaster for Facebook, bigger than their "privacy settings" issue from last year.
Can a bot or algorithm augment or emulate the magic of crowd-sourced sharing? Or will it throw Facebook into a Myspace-esque clusterfuck?
It's even more useless when it's from six hours ago. I just checked FB this morning to see the news that a friend listened to a certain album last night. I'll make sure to block that so it never comes up again.
For me, on the other hand, Facebook has put a ton of friction into sharing. Although I am a normally candid person, I find myself overconsidering whether or not I really, really should post what I'm about to. In the end, I go with self-censorship.
Sorry for the rant :|
Marco.org just had a post (http://www.marco.org/2011/09/23/business-insider) about how biz insider slices and dices his stories for their benefit. (After reading and thinking about his post, I removed BI from my morning reading list).
Honestly, I don't see this getting any better - and I'm usually an optimist. I think FB will make more of these deals with partners and we'll get more and more of the reactionary media type broadcast. All bites of info, very little substance; ADD to the extreme.
I'm in the middle of the argument that FB is bad and FB is here to stay get over it and assimilate. I developed a few FB apps in 09-10 and at first I thought it was awesome. The last app I did asked for a bunch of permissions because we needed access to someone's feed so we could create/read posts that were specific to our app. That was all good, but then I would look at the logs in our server for the feed updated callback and not only would it never stop (was kinda amazing to watch this), but we had access to all these people's feeds - like everything.
I have to think this is typical now and I know most of my relatives (young and old) grant this type of access and don't really understand what it means. In my mind, they clearly do not grep what is possible. And why should they? They're not programmers, they're just regular people.
This coupled with the FB copyright rules pushed me off the platform. My girlfriend still uses it (too much imo), my family uses it, and I still have my profile on there, but I'm not adding any more content. I think at this point it's more important to me - even as a programmer - to live life and create my own things. That's the only counterpoint I can see to a world where it's garbage in, garbage out.
It's like Facebook is testing the limits of human values of sharing ourselves and the things we like. Will we bend to the algorithms or will they bend to us?
TL;DR: Facebook is tightening its filter bubble around you and getting more in between you and your friends.
Ignoring the new features that were added, there is one feature that has disappeared -- the full list of your friend updates in the News feed.
Previously you could click on "Most recent" and get a list of all updates. Now they are filtered and it is totally inconvenient to get around this: you must explicitly check "All updates" from every friends context menu (by default it is "Most updates").
It may seem like a feature until you realize that you may miss the news that your friends are OccupyingWallStreet or criticizing Facebook or doing other twoplusbad things.
Now I am not against filtering and ranking most news (as in media) automatically. I think it is a great achievement that we are able to do this. However I am strongly against anyone deciding for me what is important for me and my friends. There is a line that should be drawn somewhere and you should not ignore this.
EVERYTHING!