Editorial: Facebook’s new sharing is anything but ‘frictionless’

http://thisismynext.com/2011/09/25/facebook-frictionless-sharing-timeline-panopticon/

by acak • 15 years ago

30 14 15 years ago

ajg1977• 15 years ago

The way that Facebook termed this "Frictionless Sharing", along with the video game achievement image, was a marvelous piece of PR. Who doesn't like things to be easier, and who wouldn't object to their game achievements being automatically posted?

I predict it'll be a matter of weeks before people discover that they really do not want apps to transparently post all of their activities for the world (or even their 'friends') to see and there's a public outcry.

itswindy• 15 years ago

Why so many (negative about) FB stories in front? I guess since Google can't Pandafi Facebook, copy their model and drive them out of business or manually give them a penalty they do this. Even monopolies have their limits apparently.

Google employees: Why not go and add a few more dozen ads on pages, there's still more room. Make Larry happy!

r00fus• 15 years ago

I predict that Google+ won't win over Facebook in the classical sense, but force Facebook to reveal how exposed all of your content on Facebook actually is.

As Facebook embraces the "frictionless sharing" of Timeline and this auto-share (esp. for links clicked from other Facebook posts), they will eventually cross a line where users get dramatically less willing to share (as it's all on your behalf without your explicit command).

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

I think it was either Robert Scoble or Jeff Jarvis who said that because of privacy issues that Facebook had last year with their confusing settings and making almost everything public by default (posts, pictures, etc), many people started making their profiles as private as possible.

So in trying to force people to make everything public by default, everyone started to make private even what they wanted to be public initially.

My guess is the auto-sharing and timeline thing will backfire in a similar way, and people will want to avoid them as much as possible. I don't think privacy is going to die in the same way Zuckerberg thinks it will. If anything, people are just now starting to realize about all these privacy issues online, and are starting to do something about them.

acak• 15 years ago

The part of the essay that stood out for me is this:

-- The panopticon was a building design dreamed up by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and in its most basic form, it’s a prison scheme which allows observers (i.e., prison guards) to have a constant view of the inmates if they so desire, without the inmates knowing for sure if they are being watched. The effect, of course, is feeling that one is always being watched, resulting in altered (more “normal,” acceptable) behavior. Bentham’s idea was, he said, applicable to poor houses, hospitals, schools, and mad houses — though he ultimately devoted his time to designing for prisons. The express purpose of the panopticon is behavior modification, what Bentham described as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” No such prison was ever built to Bentham’s specifications. --

The author hit the nail on the head in drawing that comparison to Facebook.

I have long been unsure how the usage of such a version of Facebook would affect us. The answer might lie in the psychological effects of living in a Panopticon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

http://www.cartome.org/panopticon1.htm

chexton• 15 years ago

Absolutely agree. Drawing this parallel is something I haven't considered before but it definitely makes one think.

The new music sharing features are obviously reminiscent of Last.fm. I was an avid Last.fm user at the start but I found I quickly tired of wanting everyone to know everything I listened to.

It will be interesting to see how it pans out.

aphexairlines2• 15 years ago

Rdio listing the tracks you listened to is maybe a bad example. Last.fm has been doing this for years without complaints.

skimbrel• 15 years ago

No, it's a fine example. Last.fm has always been an opt-in service, and you know what you're opting in to because you have to go to the trouble of installing an iTunes plugin.

This is opt-out.

aphexairlines2• 15 years ago

Let's make a distinction between the two aspects: Last.fm radio and Audioscrobbler. The data from audioscrobber is listed front and center in your profile as "Recently Listened Tracks," your library, top artists, and top tracks. The iTunes plugin is an audioscrobbler plugin, and yes, that's obviously opt-in. But when you sign up for Last.fm radio and start listening with the web player, it scrobbles your listening habits by default.

v21• 15 years ago

And at the bottom of the article is the call to "Like" it. And a button that has already told Facebook that I've read the article.

(Don't get me wrong, the web page has also told Google (via Plus and Google Analytics), Twitter, Chartbeat, and a bunch of ad platforms I was there. And a couple of CDN platforms, too, I guess. It's not just Facebook here.)

There's at least three points to be made here: There's a irritating design choice that doesn't let you easily specify a granular enough privacy setting (although this is weighed against the general pain of making choices). There's the fact that having a private or counterfeit or incomplete public online identity is getting ever harder these days. And there's the fact that large corporations are collecting ever more data on us, and this data is increasingly hard to evade.

mscarborough• 15 years ago

Can Facebook users please stop the hand-wringing about the severity of the different ways they are invading your privacy? And how much better it was before the latest update? Every time Facebook does something like this, there's this complaining and then people stay on it anyway.

The company has been pretty clear about its trajectory for a while now. More data mining, less user control over that data, rinse and repeat. I don't understand why every iteration of this approach comes as some kind of surprise.

Karunamon• 15 years ago

Parent comment is getting really hard to see, but.. am I really the only one who really doesn't give a crap? If I were to find this "frictionless sharing" so odious, I wouldn't install any apps that have that capability.

Not that I would in the first place. I really don't care if the whole world has my playlists and favorite bookmarks. You can go on delicious and see them all.

I do not care. I do not see what all the hubbub is about.

pygorex• 15 years ago

What Facebook seems to be missing is the same thing this article is pointing out: monitoring is not the same thing as sharing.

When I write something on a blog or like/upvote something I'm actively curating my experience for others. Knowing what songs I'm listening to isn't that valuable. Knowing which songs I like and knowing why I like them is the value-add.

barbazfoobuzz• 15 years ago

can we please stop picking on facebook? it's not fair to all the people who rely on personal data mining and serving up ads for a living. it might make them uncomfortable.

so do you think mark zuckerberg will mind if i scrape some fb profile photos and personal info and throw up a facemash-styled site like he did with his classmates' photos and info at harvard? do you think he would mind? it's ok, right?

Editorial: Facebook’s new sharing is anything but ‘frictionless’

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