There is nothing worse than a social web app that forces you to push everything you do to Facebook.
We’ve all seen these apps.
You sync them with your Facebook account once – maybe to do a friend look-up, maybe to post a single bit of content – and before you realize whats happening, everything you do on that web app is getting blasted out to your Facebook network.
It’s annoying, it’s spammy, and it can be embarrassing.
Happily, most web apps that integrate with Facebook Connect give you the courtesy of selectively choosing which post you send out to Facebook. Foursquare, Gowalla, and Yelp are just three examples of this approach. You check in, post, write a review – whatever – and upon publishing, you are given the choice of where you want to push out your content.
This is the right way to do it.
Which brings me to Facebook Places.
As I went about my business in San Francisco this past weekend, of course I was looking to log the places I went via check-in.
When it came time to choose between Facebook Places and other check-in apps, I found myself reaching for the dedicated location networks. Why? Because I didn’t want to bombard my 500+ Facebook friends with my check-ins, and I didn’t want my Facebook profile to be dominated with only check-ins.
Because Foursquare is exclusively a social location service, I don’t have these same concerns about bugging my Foursquare friend network. If you are my friend on Foursquare, by definition, you are signing up to hear about my trip to the hoops court or the coffee shop. I don’t feel bad at all.
But with Facebook Places, in its current iteration, I either blast out my location to everybody in my 500+ person network (and rely on Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm to determine which of my FB friends actually care), or I reach for another network like Foursquare, whose graph has been built specifically from the ground up for these kinds of updates.
It is conceivable that Facebook Places could add a “push to Facebook newsfeed?” option upon check-in solve this problem.
But it seems unlikely. Facebook Places is a feature that lives within the larger Facebook experience and adding a “push to Facebook” check box on a Facebook feature like Places would likely be pretty confusing for most people.
I think that Facebook Places is very impressive. But because my Facebook social graph was not built with a constant stream of location updates in mind, I’m not going to delete my Foursquare account any time soon.
YES! AGREE 100%! And yes the push to newsfeed would solve this problem. Or they could alter the Places privacy setting under “custom” to include a check-list of friends who receive those updates, instead of a text field that forces users to type the names of friends who they want to see their check-ins.
Seems like a classic simplicity vs functionality issue for FB.
Indeed. This is a basic clash of focused social networks (gowalla, 4sq, dopplr, flickr) vs Generic social networks (facebook, hi5, buzz, etc.).
You could almost make the same argument about Twitter. I don’t know about you, but I’m more comfortable posting prolifically on Twitter than I am on Facebook. Twitter is made for rapid, short, frequent updates. Facebook, not so much.
I certainly agree – heck, I don’t even share photos with everyone on Facebook (I selectively do so) but one thing I think we have to keep in mind is that for most people, there is ONE social network, and they most likely just blast out everything because they don’t say all that much as it is. They go out to dinner = one check-in on Places. Next day, go to the park = one check-in on Places, etc. Will certainly be interesting to see how it plays out.
Judging from the amount of social game updates I get from non industry people, yeah, it would seem that many are happily oblivious to the large audience on the other end of their updates.
The last comment by Lawrence, hits the nail right on the head “Twitter is made for rapid, short, frequent updates. Facebook, not so much.” No one is going to want to look at endless lists of their friends location on Facebook as that’s not its primary function. How ever signing up to a site like 4sq, you are knowingly wanting to just see this information. It seems like facebook is trying to do too many things at once. It should concentrate more on ironing out problems in other tools they have (Chat being one of them).
This makes me wonder whether the tracker will get increasingly crowded with useless information which in turn means people stop visiting Facebook. If FB is to remain a social utility, I think it needs to deal with the inevitable increase in spam that’s going to come from a wide variety of sources as the FB ecosystem increases, or risk turning people off.
I feel like their newsfeed algorithm errs on the side of screening stuff out.
I agree with the sentiment.
The thing is though, given that Foursquare is still early mass market. Facebook is mass market. For a lot of people, Facebook places will be their only experience of LBS and I’d imagine once they’re on Facebook Places, very few will have the inclination to move to Foursquare.
I’m sure that amongst those on Foursquare already, a lot will do what you did. I just don’t see this scaling to mass market.
I think this is a great point. It occurred to me as I was writing this that this may be solely an early adopter issue. Most people won’t want to share every single place they go, so they may be fine with the large audience.
We did some research around the consumer reaction to this. It showed that most people were negative towards Places on the grounds of privacy. http://bit.ly/aOVibJ
Facebook needs to be able to disable these things without the need to disable your friends attention data in your feed. Right now you can’t do this and it is already beginning to piss me off. It’s a shame you can’t disable all this rubbish in one fair sweep.
If you go to Account/Privacy Settings on Facebook, you can set your Places updates to go to only specific friends or specific list of friends.
I did not know this. You can’t do it from the app iPhone app itself (or touch.facebook.com) though.
Thanks for coping my post! Read #2 under my post entitled: Check-in Mania.
http://www.itswilder.com/post/998300227/check-in-mania
Totally agree!
For privacy issue check out Geo Messages approach. It is peer to peer location sharing: http://servletsuite.com/geomessage