I’m sat here now watching Zuckerberg saying that the amount that people want to share is increasing on a BBC documentary. The ticker is an example of this belief – and despite all the naysayers there are good reasons why this piece of technology is here to stay.
The introduction of frictionless sharing has been seen as an end to privacy as we know it. However, it is just the crown on top of a large tower of developments, each one designed to bring us closer to this point. Take the like button for instance. Whilst you may not be ‘liking’ the page that it appears on, the very existence of that little thumb on a button on the page means that Facebook was collecting data about you and adding it to the list of things that Facebook knew about you. Or how about searching whilst logged into Google? Who thought back in the good old days that being conviniently logged into your gmail all the time so that you didn’t have to bother remembering your password actually meant that Google could watch your every search and begin to tailor results and even ads to what it feels are your tastes?
So to me frictionless sharing is not a terrible addition but an inevitable conclusion. A lot has been said over the awful user experience with it being accussed of ruining sharing and even being compared to Malware. But as with every addition to Facebook, the loss of data does bring some interesting gains.
If Facebook knows what you like, what you listen to and the people you are connected to then it will be able to serve up data that it thinks will be relevant to you. I’ve shared my thoughts on the dangers of this in my post about the filter bubble but honestly we need help filtering all the crap that comes through our inbox, our feeds and readers every day. Manual curation such as the circles we see in Google+ are an example of this but how many average people have time to truly curate at the volumes that we are seeing now?
Facebook’s ticker has been criticised for sharing the minutiae of people’s day, but imagine if Facebook could begin to properly filter its 3rd party content to match the blogs, magazines and news sites that it knows you love.
Liesa Reichelt’s coined the term ambient intimacy to describe the way that social media allows us to become closer to people by sharing in the everyday details of their lives. I have people from school who I would not even recognise if I went back home and saw them in the street were it not that Facebook has told me about their new haircut, their imminent wedding and the love of their dog. The ticker brings us one step closer to the people we are connected with, showing us how they live their daily lives and the kind of stuff they read and listen to.
Through seeing what people are reading and listening to it enables you to discover new content. This opens up content to you that you may not have otherwise seen and helps you to think in a more lateral way. News sites have seen a massive increase in traffic since the advent of the ticker. Much has been written about how the Guardian has been able to reach a higher % of under 25′s – their hard to reach group. (The Inside Facebook blog has some great charts on the increasing MAU’s for several news sites.) More interestingly is the level of old news being turned over; the Independent has found that the most shared stories from their site have been from the 1990′s; content that most likely would not have been found without the ticker functionality.(Stats from the Developer Blog)
As usual, there are the teething problems with the user experience, the concerns that Facebook is pushing us in a direction we don’t want to go. But at it’s heart, the new Facebook developments seem to show the way of the future of social sharing.
A look at the negative impacts of the Facebook ticker on curation of information.
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