So, what we’re seeing isn’t the expansion of our social network; it’s the shrinking of what and who we care about. My Facebook feed is full of what friends are listening to, what friends are reading, etc. And frankly, I don’t give a damn. I would care if they told me personally; I’d even care if they used a medium as semi-personal as Twitter. The effort required to tweet tells me that someone thought it was important. And I do care about that. I will care much less if Spotify and Rdio integrate with Twitter. I already don’t care about the blizzard of automated tweets from FourSquare. Automated sharing is giving Facebook a treasure-trove of data, regardless of whether anyone cares. And Facebook will certainly find ways to monetize that data. But the bigger question is whether, by making sharing the default, we are looking at the end of social networks altogether. If a song is shared on Facebook and nobody listens to it, does it make a sound?
link: The end of social – O’Reilly Radar
Well, you are right but…on the other hand, if you didn’t care that much about Facebook why blogging about it? I never bother write about things that don’t interest me.
Yup. Me neither! (I’ve just snipped the piece from O’Reilly) I suppose what interested me is that sharing is now becoming default. In the same way that we now expect cash-points to be in cities when we go there, it feels that sharing of activities is becoming built in to our online lives. And with that, I wonder whether being shared with becomes less “special”?
I often find myself on the edge of love/hate the internet and this nearly compulsive sharing , “inbuilt” in your words. And then I wonder whether that is not an extension of ourselves…