Just a quick note to state this as a fact, in case anybody was wondering (and since I’ve had a few emails about it lately).

Under no circumstances will I ever implement Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” in Simple Facebook Connect. If you want such a thing, I recommend using another plugin.

Facebook’s frictionless sharing is a privacy invading, oversharing, useless-result creating nightmare. I block websites that use it from appearing in my News Feed, I remove Applications and services that implement it (hey Yahoo!, you’ve been axed from my life entirely because of your use of this crap), and I will not help anybody to implement it or even provide them with useful advice.

In my opinion, this is by far the worst thing Facebook has ever created. Even if you ignore the privacy implications entirely, Facebook has finally succeeded at doing something that they have been trying to do for ages: Make Facebook’s main feed almost completely worthless.

I will continue to add other features to SFC, but I use FB a lot less than I did before (and am now focusing more on Google+ anyway). However, this is one “feature” that I will not be adding.

Oh, and I’m not the only one who thinks this idea sucks rocks, BTW.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-57324406-256/how-facebook-is-ruining-sharing/
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/why-the-new-york-times-isnt-using-facebooks-frictionless-sharing/245880/
http://technorati.com/blogging/article/facebooks-frictionless-sharing-causes-friction-among/
http://news.softpedia.com/news/It-Took-Two-Months-but-People-Finally-Realize-that-Facebook-s-Auto-Sharing-Is-Creepy-235716.shtml

/rant

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8 Comments

  1. I use only the like box plugin in the SFC, I do not want to exhaust my subscribers. If they want to look cool among their friends then they will share whatever content they like. Thank you for not adding it into SFC. I am already getting a bit too annoyed by the sharing widgets that websites are putting everywhere. Specially the ones that scroll as I do. Frictionless or seamless sharing is a horror.

  2. Nicely put Otto! I completely agree. I block every app that does that as well!

  3. Amen! I would cancel facebook entirely if only I could convince the world to use something else…

  4. From The New York Times:

    Facebook Agrees to F.T.C. Settlement on Privacy

    Accusing Facebook of “unfair and deceptive” business practices, the government announced a proposed settlement that compels the company to obtain consent before making changes to users’ privacy settings.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/technology/facebook-agrees-to-ftc-settlement-on-privacy.html

  5. Hey Otto,

    Are you going to add frictionless sharing to SFC? lol j/k

    I agree with you on everything you said above 😉

  6. I’ve not found the frictionless sharing to be very frictionless.

    1) Friend or associate reads interesting article in news paper
    2) Facebook adds link to their timeline.
    3) I find the link, click on it and get asked to connect up some application.
    4) Press back button
    5) Copy text from link
    6) Paste into google
    7) Navigate to the destination of the link and read the article

    Quite tedious, it would be nice if I clicked on a link it would go to the article rather than needing me to use a search engine to track down the actual topic.

  7. Why i Comment(Leave reply) with SFC on some browser but it not happens on other browser,
    i leave a reply on some pc but not happen other pc.It’ll show only browser which my wrote?

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