Do I look fat in this blog post?
The most interesting thing about Facebook’s recent update is the indication that mainstream social data has expanded from connections to interests. Facebook is strengthening ’share everything‘ as the cornerstone of their strategy. This is a great strategic move because it pushes what normal sharing behavior is further down the ‘share everything‘ path.
Life-streaming has progressed from a fringe activity to a mainstream behavior; what used to look like narcissism now seems normal. Facebook is the primary force that has enabled this change in society’s perception of social communication.
With Facebook’s new features, sharing your activities, context and media consumption will become mainstream, everyday occurrences. This will bring the hyper-social users deeper into the data mine and pull society’s perception of normal social behavior further in as well. The more we share about ourselves the more valuable our data is. That is Facebook’s core rationale behind ‘Frictionless Sharing’.
People will share their interests in a programatic way. This will turn into data that will then be used for targeting user behavior. The programatic part is key. Under the right circumstances it removes the semantic problem of trying to understand what is meant by a post. If you use the Spotify Facebook app to listen to Miles Davis over and over or ‘check in’ to a particular TV show, there is little ambiguity. If you happen to post ‘Love this show!’ at the same time the correlation is complete.
With OpenGraph Facebook is expanding as lifestyle platform. If their app platform displaces much of the native device apps then for a certain type of person, a large portion of their digital footprint will be shared, and the data will be owned by Facebook.
Facebook’s new features reinforce profitable user behavior and at the same time commodify its substitutes and compliments. Overall, the changes are a great strategic move. It will be interesting to follow the adoption of OpenGraph and witness how society’s perception of normal social behavior evolves to included more social sharing.
