In January Facebook held a little get together to announce the next step in the major overhaul of the profile design. The Open Graph, which was announced back in September at the f8 Conference, was unveiled along with 60 new app partners to get it going. Thomas Houston of The Verge best described Open Graph as “a way to take data from other social networks and apps, and pull it into the Facebook ecosystem”. Facebook has goal of making itself the main platform on which users do everything -- Not just communicating with friends, but also listening to music, watching movies, traveling and even cooking.
This is also where Facebook uses the term “frictionless sharing.” It’s the automatic sharing of actions on Facebook without the user having to really do anything. Spotify is a great example. When you sign into Spotify, you’re signed into Facebook. So when you listen to a song, it’s immediately shared with all of your friends (or a limited number based on your settings). You didn’t have to click a “share” button, just hit “Play”. Now with the new Open Graph and app partners such as Pinterest, Airbnb, and Foodily, you’ll be able to share where you’re staying on vacation and what you’re eating just as easily as listening to music. The new action verbs such as “read”, “watched”, and “listened to” will be integrated into the new apps as well.
It sounds like a magical dreamland filled with candy and unicorns (just not ones named Charlie). But be careful. I believe that by allowing users to share almost every aspect of their life on Facebook, the site will begin to lose even more users at a faster pace than it is. I know it’s growing, but more and more people are leaving. Apart from the mountain of privacy issues that this implies, it could also lead to a sharing overload and even more social issues like the misery it’s causing now. I don’t really understand why people would even want to share what they’re eating instantly. Not many people really care about most of the stuff that’s already clogging up their news feeds so why would food make it any better?
If I had to pick anything good that could come out of this, it would be the fact that apart from the partnered apps, developers will be able to build their own apps and get them out to the public. This will allow many new developers and startups to grow their user base by giving them access to 800 million people.
I will give Facebook credit for getting social media to the point it is now, but no one wants to share every second of their life online. It may seem cool to share all the cool things in your life, but what about all 500 of your friends? Do you really want all that info in your news feed and, god forbid, the ticker? Better yet, do you really care about those aspects of your friends lives? Facebook should stick to what it’s been good at for the last eight years: Giving us a place to talk to people we don’t see every day, stalk our friends’ every move, and post status updates about how much we don’t like early classes.
