Not Sharing Is Caring
slate.com
Not Sharing Is Caring
1–10 of 53 posts
Re: Not Sharing Is Caring
#2I agree with a lot of what this article is saying. Sharing everything by default is pointless and misses the point of sharing.
I want to share something with my friends because I think it might inspire them or make them happy. Or, in the case of news, let them know about important stuff that's happening in the world. They do the same thing when they share with me.
So to blindly share everything just creates a lot of noise. If everything is shared by default, you'll need to start sifting out the signal from the noise. Which is annoying because I trust my friends to only share stuff that's relevant.
We all love lolcats but know how to find them on our own.
Re: Not Sharing Is Caring
#3While exposing everything will be noisy, I think facebook wants to collect all your activity so that it can learn and automatically share what you might manually share... It's the hard way of ultimately removing friction from manual sharing.
Re: Not Sharing Is Caring
#4It could be that this is just a separate world though. In my world, I wish to opt in and choose what I share. Perhaps in someone else's world, they wouldn't even consider not sharing something. Following what my family on Facebook do certainly convinces me that at least some people think that way.
For me, on the other hand, Facebook has put a ton of friction into sharing. Although I am a normally candid person, I find myself overconsidering whether or not I really, really should post what I'm about to. In the end, I go with self-censorship.
Re: Not Sharing Is Caring
#5The author is completely missing the point. Implicit sharing allows for everything to go into the graph in a structured way. This is the most important aspect of implicit sharing and the new Open Graph.
This doesn't mean that you're going to get inundated with meaningless shares. That would be a horrible user experience. In fact, Facebook put a lot of time and effort into making sure that is exactly what didn't happen. It's the very reason why timeline was built. It's why ticker was built. They did this because they want a place for the increased sharing to go, without degrading user experience.
But here's the really exciting part. Once all this data is in the graph, timeline and ticker will pale in comparison to what developers can do with all of this new, structured data. That is the really important thing here.
Implicit sharing is not so that you can get a notification every time someone listens to a song. It's so that a talented young developer can come along and create a beautiful application that visualizes all of your song listens, how it makes you similar or different from your friends.
Don't worry Farhad. Explicit sharing and taste isn't going away. I will still pay more attention to the link you posted of that song you love than the song that blips by in my ticker. I wouldn't criticize the new graph until its matured and we've seen the next generation of amazing apps that are going to be enabled.
Re: Not Sharing Is Caring
#6While exposing everything will be noisy, I think facebook wants to collect all your activity so that it can learn and automatically share what you might manually share... It's the hard way of ultimately removing friction from manual sharing.
In other words taking the "you" out of sharing. "You" isn't you, it's facebook.
Re: Not Sharing Is Caring
#7The author is completely missing the point. Implicit sharing allows for everything to go into the graph in a structured way. This is the most important aspect of implicit sharing and the new Open Graph. This doesn't mean that you're going to get inundated with meaningless shares. That would be a horrible user experience. In fact, Facebook put a lot of time and effort into making sure that is exactly what didn't happe…
Not sure why this was voted down.
You make a good point about the possibility of mining all this data, but I'm not sure I want to give it away. We (well, some of us), go to lengths to maintain separate online personas. Why do I care if Facebook knows what my most-played songs are? I can get that info from iTunes, etc.
They're going to need a strong pull (killer app, privacy controls, whatever) to get my data.
Re: Not Sharing Is Caring
#8Frictionless sharing without proper curation could kill Facebook. Friction naturally encourages the crowd-sourcing of curation - by having to click a share button or fill out a simple form I'm forced to think about what I'm sharing and the context to present it in. Knowing what songs my friends are listening to right at this moment isn't very useful information. Having a friend reminisce on their wall or tweet about about the one time they heard that song live, in-person and the epic good times that followed - THAT is truly "sharing", that is the "why" and not just the "what" that makes sharing addictive.
Can a bot or algorithm augment or emulate the magic of crowd-sourced sharing? Or will it throw Facebook into a Myspace-esque clusterfuck?
Re: Not Sharing Is Caring
#9The author is completely missing the point. Implicit sharing allows for everything to go into the graph in a structured way. This is the most important aspect of implicit sharing and the new Open Graph. This doesn't mean that you're going to get inundated with meaningless shares. That would be a horrible user experience. In fact, Facebook put a lot of time and effort into making sure that is exactly what didn't happe…
Don't confuse sharing with data collection. Data about a user's activities can be collected without sharing that data with the user's friends.
Re: Not Sharing Is Caring
#10I don't agree with everything the author says but I think I agree with the sentiment. I think frictionless sharing is a departure from how people express themselves in real life. During real world interactions we present our carefully tailored selves to the rest of the world. We don't tell everyone everything we are doing for a reason.
One positive with reducing friction is that it might be easier to find common ground with someone. But overall im not sure I like it- social grooming is a good thing