Facebook last week gradually released a major new sharing feature, which the company explains here , and is touted by observers as a significant begining. Chris Hughes, one of the original founders, returned as spokeman to announce the release on the company blog on Friday.
“My Shares” wins prominent billing on the left panel, right under photos which leads to the biggest photo sharing site on the net. But it pales in comparison. When My Photos appeared a year ago, it was feature complete relative to other photo sharing sites. This bookmarking feature either lacks important features, or could be called spartan like the rest of the site. It lacks the ability to save privately, file into categories, search with “shared” content, or follow the popularity of any piece of shared content. What are the Top 10 shared urls? Only The Facebook knows.
The best scenario for FB would be if major content companies, like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and bloggers everywhere started offering the ‘F’, like “digg this” got digg.com going. Obviously this would greatly expand FB’s brand and reach.
Facebook is all about “increasing the flow of information”, so this is to let you tell your friends about what is cool on the internet. And a post on Feed can be extremely powerful: a cleverly named group ” For Every 1,000 that join this group I will donate $1 for Darfur” grew to half a million members in just a few days, since everyone could see their friends joining it in almost real time on Feed. Feed makes it really easy to jump on a popular bandwagon, so if an item gets shared around widely, it can capture everyone’s attention, exactly like getting to the top of digg can take down your servers.
Yet for me, Feed is getting extremely cluttered and I can’t praise its relevance, though I bet the mammoth effort to raise this has raised Red Bull’s net earnings by a cent a share. I like Feed, and love the idea of it. But, I find irrelevant messages about people I hardly know adding friends I certainly don’t know, extracts of blog notes that couldn’t interest even 10% of readers (since blog import makes posts so.. natural) and even advertising. So now I’ll see cute kitten (or stripper) photos and the newest you-won’t-believe-this youtube video. I’m not sure I’ll really learn more about my friends, or what is really important to them. It’s much harder to blog about big important ideas, like my purpose in life, than it is to share something you find. If one of my Real friends really did write such an awesome note, I’d probably miss it.
One objective measure of Feed’s relevance is whether people use it to look at more of their friend’s content than before. Traffic numbers are in dispute, but dispite the launch of a new freshmen class and tens of thoursands of non-school networks and a spate of new features including Election coverage , Facebook’s traffic is probably growing moderately at 5-10% a month. So at least so far, people probably haven’t found huge amounts of useful content in Feed, Durfur groups exepted.
Facebook suggests I only friend people who are really my friends, and makes it fairly transparent to remove someone from my friends, but that hasn’t made unfriending someone especially .. nice. I suppose someday people will learn that I’ve seen enough cute kittens, or I can find them myself on google. But hey, check out this inspirational video.
