“Facebook’s “frictionless” sharing doesn’t enhance sharing; it makes sharing meaningless.”

The quote above from The end of social totally sums up how I feel about Facebook’s new frictionless sharing: automatically posting read news, watched movies, or listened-to songs.

Facebook’s real value comes from Likes. When a friend shares something, it means they’ve put their seal of approval on it. “This is a good thing.” And, in todays world of information-overload and endless choices, recommendations from friends are increasingly how we decide which things to try.

Frictionless sharing does the exact opposite. Instead of only showing me the good stuff, it shows me everything and doesn’t help me filter the good from the bad. Instead of telling me “these are the things you should try”, frictionless sharing less me “these are all the things you could try.”

It’s not how people work offline, either. When you’re looking for a good movie to watch you don’t ask your friends to list of all the movies they’ve seen. You ask them to name their favourites. When a friend tells you they just tried that new Thai restaurant, you don’t blankly nod in acknowledgement; you ask them if they liked it.

There is utility in Facebook likes. That utility is lost with automatic sharing.

There’s been a lot written on this topic lately, but I this this paragraph is the most concise I’ve read:

Frictionless sharing isn’t better sharing; it’s the absence of sharing. There’s something about the friction, the need to work, the one-on-one contact, that makes the sharing real, not just some cyber phenomenon. If you want to tell me what you listen to, I care. But if it’s just a feed in some social application that’s constantly updated without your volition, why do I care? It’s just another form of spam.

Source: radar.oreilly.com

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