Sharing is caring…

Article by Nisha 27 Jan 2012

We’ve all had a little time to digest the ‘frictionless sharing’ concept facebook announced last year and see what it means in practice. Connect your facebook account to some key partner apps and your friends will be able to see what you’re listening to, watching, reading even, without you having to lift another finger outside of listening, watching, reading through the partner apps, and do it themselves.

Great publicity for the content services and for content creators with the potential to reach facebook’s more than 800 million users and prompt signups – Music Ally recently released some liveblog notes that indicate Ken Parks (Chief Content Officer at Spotify) believes Spotify’s recent climb to three million paying subscribers is at least in part attributable to Facebook connectivity. Ticketmaster ticket sales and Netflix movie streams for example will likely see a similar impact, if they haven’t already.

Theory is that listening/watching/reading = recommendation.

The opposite side of this story comes in for those for whom, taking music as an example, listening to something doesn’t necessarily mean you’d recommend it to a friend. Those of us who listen to user-generated playlists, streaming radio, music from blog aggregators and the like will often skip tracks after a short while or listen just to know it for reference and the way frictionless sharing works at the moment is to track and publicise everything unless you enable ‘private listening’, whether you ‘like’ the track and would recommend it to your friends or not, in contrast to the 50% listening required for a last.fm scrobble.

For me, it’s the manual action of writing a blog post, inclusion in a Sushi Session or a last.fm ‘love’ that’s the recommendation, not necessarily the listening part. I’m much more likely to ‘share’ to facebook actively than turn on the automatic ticker.

There have been a couple of services launched recently that focus on users who may feel the same – This is My Jam is like a twitter for music recommendations that involves an option to manually share to twitter and facebook at the user’s discretion, some interesting takeaways here, and Splash.fm, currently in private beta, gamifies social music discovery.

I’d love to see a simplified recommendation option in the Facebook/Spotify relationship similar to the last.fm ‘love’ service and twitter, or a minimum listening time-period before posting for example, as a halfway between frictionless and entirely customised sharing – hit the heart and send a pre-selected recommendation message. Maybe it’s one for the app developers…

Tags: digital