Facebook [f8] decides everybody “likes” bloody everything

Facebook are at it again! So basically the biggest development to Facebook in a long while saw Facebook showing their hand at the f8 conference last wednesday, and they’ve released all the details of their evolution of Facebook Connect, the way they allow users to connect their experience on Facebook with any external sites (which embrace it).

The biggest development is called Open Graph – in a nutshell it’s the new “Like” function, but you’re now able to put it on your site – so people can like articles, videos, whatever you put on your Website – these then feed through to your News Feed as if yo’ve just liked something on Facebook itself.

There’s also two types of “Like” – one of them (highlighted by having a blue box round it) as the Major daddy of Likes – the one that signs you up to get updates on your wall from that brand. You’ve basically become a fan, without really knowing it. The other just shares the like on your wall – and you’re signed up to nowt (we’ll call it the good one…).

The second, and ultimately most worrying, is called Social Plugins.  This is a toolbar that a site can easily program into it’s code, so that sites can embed relevant Facebook information into a site – such as, the CNN.com homepage – if you go on here while you’re logged into Facebook, you may notice a box that tells you if any of your friends have “liked” any relevant articles – and links straight to them. To me, that sounds like a great idea.

On this level, I think it works well – someone has chosen to “Like” a piece of content, and as well as posting this on Facebook itself, it tells me on CNN, as I arrive, that my friend liked an article – a good user experience.

BUT – there’s a darker side to this – and Spotify is the prime example. Their new release (v0.4.3 or something like that) includes a Social Plugin within the desktop app, that shows all your Facebook friends (the ones who are online, and have Spotify), and you’re able to see what they’re listening to, and all their playlists.

It sounds innocuous at first, but have Facebook opened themselves up again to Privacy issues? The problem for the user, is that they haven’t “Liked” anything – they haven’t opted into to sharing this information, Facebook does it automatically. The same could work for Youtube – my Facebook friends all being able to see the last 10 videos I watched?

I’m just waiting for a clever developer to create an application that stops Facebook doing this – or, as Facebook advised (for people who don’t want to share everything) – “Just log out of Facebook”.

Either way, I’m going to do one of them.

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