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Tag: frictionless sharing

  • Facebook, Instagram Lose A Little More Friction

    It has just become a little bit easier to share your favorite sepia-toned mini masterpieces with your adoring Facebook friends, as Instagram users now have a new way to share photos across the platform.

    Monday’s version 2.5 update gives users the opportunity to optionally share their photo “likes” to Facebook

    That means that every time you double-click one of your Instagram pals’ photos, or click the “like” heart below it, that photo will be pushed to your Facebook Timeline as well as your friends’ News Feeds and Tickers.

    The “like” sharing is not active by default. to enable it, simply go to your settings > sharing settings > Facebook and you’ll see the option:

    Authorizing through Facebook will prompt users to confirm sharing their “likes,” which will also notify them that thy can always change their minds and reverse the frictionless flow in settings. Indeed, one drunken like-happy evening may force you to rethink your decision.

    If you continue on with the “like” sharing and actually like one fo your Instagram friend’s photos, here’s what it will look like on your Facebook friends’ News Feed:

    Of course, we all remember that Facebook acquired Instagram back in April for a cool billion dollars, and that month saw Instagram traffic shoot up 78%. The Instagram app allows social sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, and Tumblr. Facebook is the only one of them that currently has this kind of frictionless sharing of “liked” photos.

  • Facebook Testing Sponsored Action Stories

    Facebook Testing Sponsored Action Stories

    A few weeks ago, Facebook launched their Sponsored Stories initiative to allow advertisers to promote specific posts within users’ news feed. The sponsored stories are not newly generated ads, but already-existing posts that companies can pay to promote after the fact. You can identify a Sponsored Stories by the impossible to see slightly visible gray text near the timestamp on posts.

    Now, Facebook is allowing the “action” posts – reading, watching, listening – to be turned into ads and given prominence on both your ticker and your news feed.

    According to Josh Constine at Tech Crunch, Facebook is allowing this a small pilot program for the time being, but it could definitely turn into a situation where any and every advertiser could promote any Open Graph action.

    The Open Graph actions, of course, are part of Facebook’s big push toward “frictionless sharing.” You know the types of posts – “John Grant listened to Kanye West on Spotify” or “Jessica Smith read ‘Obama’s Economy’ on The Washington Post.” These are the stories that appear in your ticker and oftentimes in your news feed that show activities in which your friends are participating.

    The “frictionless” part comes from the automatic sharing of the activity once you’ve authorized it’s connection with Facebook.

    This change would mean that instead of Spotify being the only entity that could sponsor and promote a post about someone listening to a song, now a record company or a band itself could promote these types of stories.

    As Constine points out, the Open Graph is the key to the future of advertising on Facebook. It provides for more targeted ads based on user’s own activities and that of their friends.

    Facebook’s sponsored stories have gone through a slight name change, with the company referring to them as “featured stories” now. One report says that these featured/sponsored stories are going to be coming to your mobile devices within the next few weeks.

  • Washington Post Facebook App Nears 4 Million Users

    The era of Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” is in full swing, and while some are still expressing privacy concerns and lamenting that Facebook is killing the essence of sharing, it appears that some folks are happy to hop on the wave of change.

    The Washington Post, D.C.’s largest and one of the U.S.’s most venerable papers, has announced that their Facebook app, the Washington Post Social Reader, has amassed over 3.5 million subscribers. And the number is growing fast, as the total is currently over 3.8 million.

    Their ability to gain this many subscribers in only two months can be traced to the younger audience. A whopping 83% of the users of Washington Post’s reader app are under 35 years old. They can also thank the international audience, as 20% of their subscription base comes from India.

    “We knew there would be widespread interest with the app because regardless of who you are or where you live, if you and your friends are on WP Social Reader, you will find something that interests you. As we continue to innovate and add new content, we look forward to growing our user base, our content partners, and seeing where things go with this friend-centric news experience” said Vijay Ravindran, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of The Washington Post Company.

    Of course, not everybody has been quick to embrace these reader apps. If you’re unfamiliar with what they do, they basically allow for Facebook to share everything you are reading (once you allow permission). Articles that you read will show up on Facebook’s new(ish) activity bar for all of your friends to see.

    Naturally, you can understand why some people might feel like this is a step in the wrong direction. These apps are one example of the “frictionless sharing” concept that Facebook has been pitching for a few months now. Another example is the Spotify app that many users on Facebook have become enamored with. It shares any song that you listen to using the music service to your activity stream.

    Opponents of the frictionless sharing concept have argued that it in a way, ruins the concept of sharing. If an app shares everything that you’re doing, it cheapens the whole idea of sharing, which should be a selective process.

    But the Washington Post Social Reader’s success should signal that some people want to share everything that they read and are happy to see what all of their friends are reading as well. The Washington Post is not the only media source with a frictionless sharing app presence. The Guardian on Facebook has 3.4 million active monthly users and if you’ve been alive for the last few months you’ve seen that quite a few users are using the Yahoo! app for news stories.

    Sure, there are concerns will all these frictionless apps. But it sure looks like a significant group of Facebook users see the merit.

    What do you think about these kinds of app? Are you subscribed? Let us know in the comments.