Is Facebook ruining our sharing experience or enhancing it by its use of frictionless sharing?
Frictionless sharing, where anything that you read online could potentially be shared with everyone in your time line – whether or not you explicitly share it sits uneasily with many of us. Sometimes we don’t want to know too much about what goes on in our friends lives. When my friend was involved in a horrendous accident last year, I took over the running of her life, bills, accounts, everything. I had to deal with documents and papers belonging to someone else that you don’t usually have to deal with unless they are dead.
I didn’t like knowing the minute details of someone else’s life.
But by putting barriers in the way of sharing freely might prevent someone from sharing that item. If it’s too complex, then people might just turn away. Sharing is key to effective social networking so it stands to reason that if it’s easy to share things then things will get shared more readily.
Our open graph, the things we do on Facebook, will be shared by everyone we’re connected to. Everyone. Whether we like it or not..
Sometimes Facebook gives us more information than we would like. We see flirty exchanges by friends and in-jokes between them and their friends. Sometimes we feel like we’re prying. Sometimes, we’re peeping into others’ private lives. And apps such as the Washington post and the Guardian app, are great for distilling content that we might have missed but our friends in similar circles have read and shared. It’s having an impact on the news too as every piece of content can now be reused and shared.
I’m starting to feel as uncomfortable as Sue T above does. I’m torn between finding some gem of an article and feeling I’m digging to deeply into the private lives of the people I’m connected to.
It’s a fine line. And one that will get more difficult to keep on the right side of as more and more apps invoke Frictionless sharing and track our every move.
Perhaps clicking that “Share” icon is the only way to share. Share knowingly…
Eileen is a social business strategist and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact her to find out how she can help your business extend its reach.
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