Jeff Sonderman, for Poynter, on the latest Facebook privacy brouhaha:
New Facebook-based apps like Washington Post Social Reader, and similar ones from The Guardian and The Daily encourage Facebook users to read their stories and pump all that reading activity out to their friends. […]
This so-called “frictionless sharing” has big problems.
One problem is that the “friction” — the act of choosing what to share, with whom, and how — is what makes sharing meaningful. […]
The fact that my friend read an article is not useful without knowing more. Did he like it? Did he think I would like it? Did it make him laugh, cry, gasp or sigh? Did he read it because his boss or his teacher told him to, or because he was genuinely interested?
Sonderman’s right: on the level of the individual, frictionless sharing is totally creepy. I don’t want all of my Facebook friends reading over my shoulder, and I don’t know anyone who would.
But what about an anonymized aggregate of that information? Imagine a section on the site where your friends’ consumed media are collected and weighted, stripped of the stifling personal information. Now that’d be interesting — and much more useful, too.
Frictionless sharing, so implemented, won’t replace active sharing. They’ll simply exist on two different planes.
Lovely site for saving and sharing images. I got lucky and received an early invite, but it’s now open for everyone. Definitely worth checking out.
I am without an iOS device, but the new sharing features accessible via the web are really well done.
Narratives resonate because of their humanity. They are people laid bare. That’s the magic of baseball: the pitches and plays, themselves little tales of triumph and failure, connect to form spectacularly human stories spanning games, seasons and eras.
When I’m feeling cynical, I wonder if today’s youth are too busy writing their own narratives in real-time to hear those of others, even the ones that really matter. Can Facebook evoke empathy when its focus is so firmly on yourself?
But status updates and tweets aren’t so different from pitches. Each is a tiny story, from which we can glean only a little. It’s the aggregate that matters.
Social media sites don’t handle long-term narrative well. The stories get lost in streams and archived on pages in the deep and the dark. And how long will any of it last?
The narratives are there, though, if you take the time to find them. But it shouldn’t be so hard.
How can we use the social web to weave new stories, in ways never told before?
Glenn Fleishman for TidBITS, astute as always. Read Adam Engst’s take, too.
Tweetage Wasteland has become one of my very favorite blogs.
I am in awe of the social graph and the power of sharing. But I am worried about group think and a growing inability to be alone. I worry that someday my entire world will be shared, annotated and generally infringed upon by everyone I’ve ever met (and maybe a few hundred million folks I haven’t).
Don’t miss the kicker, something I’m strongly considering.
Couldn’t stop nodding my head while reading this. A nice compliment to Jaron Lanier’s outstanding You Are Not a Gadget.
But to the essay, I must add: There is a choice, even today. Want some solitude? Then turn off the phone.
Andy Baio on the aforelinked Please Rob Me.
The rise of location-based social media holds a lot of promise and benefit for participants. But a legitimate concern about them is that they make it too easy to track where you are. For some people, that’s more information than they want out there.
Well, three guys - Barry Borsboom, Frank Groeneveld, Boy van Amstel - have taken this fear to its logical extension, with their site Please Rob Me.
Roger Ebert, one of my very favorite writers, is now on Twitter.