Facebook: all shared out?

I expect most of you have noticed the new items that have started appearing in your Facebook feeds: Spotify playlists of music that your friends are listening to and news articles from a whole host of national and international papers. They are part of the ‘OpenGraph’ scheme that Facebook has been pushing in earnest over the last few months: adding a few tags to your website means that any links to your website from within Facebook makes it a Facebook page.

Facebook’s been selling this feature hard: it describes the feature as enabling you to ‘integrate your Web pages into the social graph’, whatever that means. Yet how much control does the average user have on articles that appear in your profile, and how intrusive is the new service? As anyone trying to use any of the new links will have noticed, you can’t click on news articles on Facebook without signing up for ‘a new social reading experience’. Before agreeing to use the service you can choose which of your friends get to see what articles you read, a feature which I suspect few people are using. On getting through to the article, you are delivered to a Facebook themed version of the news website, with an option to visit the actual website if you wish.

It’s all fairly straightfoward and has been embraced with some enthusiasm by downturn-stricken publishers as a way of driving hits and advertising revenue. Yet despite the new media/social media feeding frenzy, of how much benefit is this to the average user? The new interface adds nothing of value to the reader, unless you find comfort in reading reams of PR waffle about the power of social sharing.

The biggest change that you have probably noticed is that your feed is now cluttered with the titles of articles your friends have read. If you have anywhere near the average number of friends, the articles are bound to be from a wide selection and not really catered to anything you are interested in. As far as new and interesting reading material goes, I’ve seen little. The same applies to Spotify in my opinion. I don’t make friends solely on the basic of music taste, and in many cases would rather not know about what my friends have been listening to.

One might argue that the responsibility of choosing which feeds end up in your timeline lies with your friends, as they are in control of what you see after all. Yet I would have to disagree - the sharing system in Facebook is very cleverly organised to make limiting sharing a few orders of difficulty more complex to organise than expanding sharing. In a system geared towards drastically increasing the amount of information you push out to the world, it’s not surprising we’re hit with much more than we can possibly care about.

It wouldn’t be wise to underestimate the way media sharing has changed our communication. Yet sharing is only effective when it is organic, not when it is forced. Whole hordes of PR representatives shouting about the value of ‘next generation creative synergy’ will not get me to read an article about something that doesn’t interest me, no matter how hard they push it into my feed.

Social media is in essence about finding information that interests you that you wouldn’t have found before, but it doesn’t mean that information can be thrown at you from every context. When I log onto Facebook it is to share things with all my friends, a diverse bunch of people from different countries, with diverse political and cultural tastes. Shoehorning views that are of no interest to them into my feed doesn’t interest me. Sharing is been great, but as with everything, the point of ‘too much’ has been reached.