Yes, Facebook Really is Trying to Get All Your Information–Tasteful or Not

empowersocialmedia.com

Depending on your point of view, Facebook’s aim to be our central hub of all incoming and outgoing information is either awesome, barely registers as a blip on the “meh” scale, or makes you want to dump your profile and go off the grid.

In Not Sharing Is Caring: Facebook’s terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web, Zuckerberg’s got more going on than just re-sculpting our profiles and News Feeds:

“If Facebook’s CEO has his way, everything you do online will be shared by default. You read, you watch, you listen, you buy—and everyone you know will hear all about it on Facebook.”

Yes, Facebook is a business, and businesses make money, and we help Facebook make money through our information being diverted into all sorts of channels, some of which are fun for the user (social sharing apps) and some of which are not (random ads).

On the whole, we put up with it because we’re not yet ready to leave the connections we’ve made behind or features we like. We’re comfortable with the platform, and it’s just too darn easy to dash off a quick comment, upload an in-the-moment picture or arrange a birthday event when your invite-list is already there.

And as the article points out, at least we still have the option to opt-in to these new apps before they start auto-sharing what we do with them.

But how much sharing is too much?

I do like seeing what my friends are up to. I’ve found out some cool things hiding among all the chatter of who likes what page and who commented on which friend’s comment to another friend’s comment on their friend’s post. Before, if I wasn’t looking at the News Feed at the right time, I’d miss what a whole lot of somebodies had posted. Now with the immediacy of the Ticker and its scroll feature, I think I’m seeing more, and more easily.

But what we’re missing is telling these apps, the Ticker, and the News Feed just WHAT we want to share. Instead of being able to set our own options so every single “like” or comment on a friend’s post isn’t automatically broadcast, we’ve had to tell our friends to change their subscription options to us so they won’t see all the fluff. We’ve had to school each other on what “Friends of Friends” really means, now that it’s way more up close and personal than it was before. To me it just seems to be working backward.

And just wait ’til everyone gets the Timeline.