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Comment by recuter | Hacker News Reader

The Open Graph examples given are: “Bob just watched a video on Socialcam” or “Jane just planned a trip on TripAdvisor”. Even if Bob and Jane are my dearest friends, why should I care?

  "A large percentage of them are related to ecommerce transactions."

This reminds me of a short lived startup called Blippy[1] that attempted to get people to automatically share their credit card purchases. They even got a not insignificant amount of people to share that info -- turns out it just didn't make for a compelling firehose.

I would only care about Jane using TripAdvisor if I myself was planning a trip just then, Google works because there already exists an intent to purchase that they funnel to the highest bidder. Open Graph as presented by the OP will just be mostly noisy events from people that I happen to know.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blippy

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> Open Graph as presented by the OP will just be mostly noisy events from people that I happen to know.

Agreed. Seems the basis is sub-par. It shouldn't be friends, it should be people with similar interests. In college people may largely have similar interests. As adults the interests of friends diverge. This is why I like HN but not FB.

This is why I like Twitter, but not FB.

FB is an amalgamation of everyone the user has met. Twitter is a collection of people who interest the user.

The fact that many people spend lots of time on Facebook is evidence that there are a lot of people who want to know about Bob's video and Jane's trip.

They want to know about Bob and Jane, not the apps/brands that spam their timelines.

Again, Jane is going on a trip, here's the picture album, all of that I might want to know about. The fact that she specifically used TripAdviser would only (possibly) matter to me by a coincidence of fate if I am also about to plan a trip of my own.

To put it into cruder terms: if my friend is bragging about a massive dump he took that might be content that I find amusing but the brand of toilet paper he used doesn't enter into it.

Or, another way: If Jane was going to post a status update about her forthcoming trip and had such a great experience using TripAdviser that she would mention it of her own accord that is one thing.

If TripAdviser just managed to get permission to post to her timeline, that's quite another. They are not equivalent by any stretch of the imagination. And while the former is much more likely to get a reaction from her friends, neither are relevant beyond idle chatter to anybody who is not currently in the market for what TripAdviser offers.

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