Facebook has done it again: managed to cause general outrage amongst its users because of yet another change to the social networking site. The cause of this most recent backlash is the addition of the Open Graph apps, which, by automatically sharing what a user has read or listened to, are there to enable ‘frictionless sharing’, to use Facebook’s terminology. Unfortunately for Facebook however, its ‘frictionless sharing’ has definitely rubbed some people up the wrong way.

With the Open Graph, when you read a Facebook-app integrated Guardian article, or listen to music via Spotify, this information is automatically  shared, unfiltered, with your Facebook contacts via the Ticker, your profile, and sometimes also the news feed. Whilst it is possible to opt out and to choose who to share your media consumption with, the default setting automatically shares everything with all of your Facebook contacts.

The blogosphere has been in various states of uproar, with the new development being accused of everything from being pushy, manipulative and hostile to ruining the experience of sharing. Indeed, ‘sharing’ seems the wrong word to describe what the Open Graph apps do. Sharing is voluntary, a considered, definitive action: what the Open Graph is doing is unfiltered, unasked for broadcasting. Instead of enabling an easier environment for sharing what you’ve enjoyed reading or listening to with your friends, the Open Graph may end up alienating Facebook users, as your friends are unlikely to be interested in every single mundane minutiae of your media and music consumption.

As CNet’s Molly Rants points out, there is a difference between conscious sharing and Facebook’s ‘passive’ sharing. The Open Graph merely regurgitates vast amounts of unfiltered information, and is thereby removing the social, thoughtful aspect of deliberately sharing with your friends something you’ve enjoyed- the act of which being what many feel is the underlying social experience that makes Facebook so popular. Instead of encouraging anything, the Open Graph’s constant stream of information is putting people off, and instead of enabling sharing, it may inadvertently encourage self-censoring instead.

Facebook themselves seem to realize the potential discomfort or embarrassment caused by inadvertently sharing the fact that you’ve read a controversial article or listened to the entire back-catalogue of Ace of Base with all your Facebook contacts. Though it says on the Facebook blog that Facebook “may” develop its own solution to this problem, the onus and responsibility is put sternly back onto the users, who, the blog advises, can manually go back and delete embarrassing posts, limit who sees what on the Ticker, or opt out altogether. This is particularly irksome, and inconsiderate: why do we now have to go to the trouble of manually deleting posts and unticking boxes for a service we didn’t even want in the first place?  

The reasoning behind the so-called frictionless sharing and the Open Graph apps is that it allows Facebook to track what people are viewing, reading or listening to, and then to use that information to develop more personalized targeted ads and better services based on past user behavior. Whilst improving the quality of targeted ads can enhance the web browsing experience, Facebook has gone about it the wrong way. As one blogger points out, when data is used to recommend things, that’s a good thing, but when data is unfiltered, pushed out towards everyone, it becomes spam rather than something of interest. To quote: “That data could be used to deliver us new recommendations for discovery, analytics showing us things about ourselves we never knew before because we couldn’t see the forest for the trees. When a giant social network does it wrong though, that puts the whole opportunity for everyone to do it well at risk”.

At plista, we specialize in precisely what this particular blogger articulated- namely, gathering and filtering information in order to recommend relevant, useful content. Facebook has taken away the filtering process, which ironically is the one crucial ingredient that makes social sharing enjoyable; or, as in plista’s case, what makes our RecommendationAds so successful. From friends sharing specific songs they like, to plista filtering information to come up with specific recommendations to other content on a website, this filtering process is what made Facebook’s pre-Open Graph-era sharing personal and gratifying, and what makes plista’s RecommendationAds potent and relevant.

It will be interesting to see how the Open Graph develops, and if, as one blogger has predicted, it will indeed re-define sharing and the way we consume information. In the meantime, however, let’s hope Facebook implements a better, easier way to opt out of the Open Graph apps, and that the social media giant realizes that sharing does need to be a selective, conscious process. After all, not everyone needs, or wants, to know just how often you’ve listened to the latest song by Lady Gaga on Spotify.

Find out more about plista: http://www.plista.com/