12.20.2011

Frictionless Sharing

During a recent conversation I had with Time Inc.'s social media editor, Allie Townsend, she mentioned a lot of online publications are turning their attention to frictionless sharing.

If any of you use Spotify (If you don't, I highly recommend it.), you've already experienced it firsthand. In a nutshell, whenever you listen to music using Spotify it shares the information with your Facebook profile. By encouraging users to log into their Facebook profiles while using the music streaming app, Spotify found a great way to market itself on peoples' news feeds.

More recently, many of you have probably noticed the Washington Post Social Reader cropping up on your Facebook news feeds. This too uses frictionless sharing, as everything you read will show up on your profile.

No longer do you have to actively share information because more and more applications are doing it for you. Unfortunately, you also can't control who you share with at this stage in the game.

My question to everyone is how do you think this will change the news industry, if at all?

At the very least, I feel news organizations have found a brand new way market themselves. But this could also prove a great way to disseminate news content without having to manually upload a story link to Facebook every time. The possibilities seem endless.

Also, here's a link that explains frictionless sharing and its pros and cons better than I ever could:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_trends_of_2011_frictionless_sharing.php
Posted by at

2 comments:

Jack Speer said...

Dave,

I can see how quite a few people would like the idea of " frictionless sharing", but to to me it seems like a bit of an "over share."

Do I really need all of my Facebook friends knowing what article I'm reading at any given time? If I want to share something with the social media group, or even select members of my group, it isn't hard to do.

To me, its pretty obvious this is a technique to use readers like bots to get more eyeballs. As you point out " unfortunately, you also can't control who you share with at this stage in the game."

Based on how this appears to work don't hold your breath on ever getting that kind of control. I will read the link you included, but I imagine it says pretty much the same thing. Tt may not be that different from what we all do voluntarily anyhow, but theres something about total lack of control that bugs me.

8:40 AM
Chris Harvey said...

I, too, am bothered by the lack of control a reader has in "frictionless sharing." You would have to remember to close Facebook before reading/listening to keep your every move from others. I much prefer sharing stories/ideas that I actively choose to share.

7:51 AM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)