How Facebook’s Frictionless Sharing Will Change Us

by Will Francis, posted on 28 September, 2011 at 12:48 pm, filed under Facebook, Privacy, Social Media, Social Networking, Web. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

Last week Zuckerberg’s near-billion-strong network of pretty much everyone outside China with Internet access gained yet more features including the OpenGraph actions which allow content services such as Spotify, Netflix and the like to broadcast in real-time what you’re doing.

This is known as ‘frictionless sharing’ because you don’t have to consume the content, think “I’m consuming content that my friends might like” and then go through a series of clicks to broadcast the fact. You simply give Facebook access to, let’s say Spotify, and the music you are listening and have listened to will automatically be broadcast on the social network. Zuckerberg encouraged app developers to request full publishing rights from users (does anyone read the ‘Allow app’ pages anyway?) which suggests a vision for the future in which every book or article we read, recipe we follow, video we watch and so on is published without us needing to think about it, which judging by our past form means we’ll forget about it.

We’ll be living our lives in public in a new way. A few years ago with the rise of Facebook and Twitter many pundits commented on how strange it was that people felt compelled to report on what they were having for breakfast and mulled over these newly public lives we were living. We are now entering a new phase which may well go on to characterise what could be called ‘web 3.0′ (if we insist on applying a false versioning system to the internet to satisfy lazy journalism!) in which the constant publishing we have become comfortable with happens automatically and is seamlessly integrated into our lives.

I’ve spoken in the past about the ‘digital footprint’ we leave everywhere courtesy of always-online technology in our pockets these days. This is the perfect technological landscape for frictionless sharing to flourish. The concern is that users less social-media-savvy than us aren’t fully aware of exactly what’s going on and what motives drive the companies who provide such wonderful technology for free. You only need to look at how virulently the ‘Facebook will start charging next week’ rumour spread to see that so many users of Facebook don’t understand the real purpose of the site or why such a valuable product is offered for free. They are making a significant transaction, seemingly unknowingly.
Aside from the increasingly complicated data bargain we’re all getting into, I think there will also be an interesting cultural shift. Now that we’re living in self-imposed goldfish bowls, will our content consumption change? I’ve already caught myself jumping to the the stop button in Spotify before a particularly rubbish track has started. Of course, I didn’t have to connect Spotify and Facebook but I quite like being able to share and discover music this way with friends. The thing is, can I be bothered to disconnect Spotify from Facebook just to listen to that one Lady Gaga track? Probably not, I’m more likely to just not play it. I’m already becoming more like my normal, predictable self. Will this make us as content consumers averse to experimenting, to listening to the album tracks and going outside our cultural comfort zones? It looks like frictionless sharing will make us fit our cultural tribe stereotype more accurately and ultimately make us easier to profile and target with advertising. Maybe that’s exactly how Zuckerberg wants us.
Will Francis is co-founder of Harkable and a consultant for DDB London
Follow Will on Twitter and Google+