Has Facebook finally seen the light and realized we don't really care if a friend listened to "Roar" on Spotify, broke a new Candy Crush record, or burned 225 calories while running with Calorie Counter?
The social network has announced Tuesday that it will no longer prioritize implicitly shared posts, that is posts from third-party apps you have given permission to share automatically. The auto-posts will still be around, but they will no longer be as visible as explicitly shared stories. The reason? Most users consider auto-shared posts as spam.
"In general, we've found that people engage more with stories that are shared explicitly rather than implicitly, and often feel surprised or confused by stories that are shared implicitly or automatically," writes Peter Yang of Facebook's product marketing department. "Over the past year, the number of implicitly shared stories in News Feed has naturally declined. The decline is correlated with how often people mark app posts as spam, which dropped by 75% over the same period."
Users, who have been clamoring for a better News Feed experience, will definitely be happy about this. However, Facebook can't keep everyone happy with all the changes it is rolling out. Third-party developers, for instance, have been using the Facebook platform since 2011 to launch their apps, letting users use their Facebook credentials to log in to those apps.
Previously, authorizing those apps with your Facebook login gave the apps permission to auto-share posts on your News Feed, which helped promote the apps. With less priority on these auto-posts and Facebook's recently launched Anonymous Logins, app-makers will have to turn to other ways to promote their apps.
One tool Facebook has provided developers is the Like button for mobile apps, which will let users share content from the app to Facebook, but not without tapping the Share button. Facebook is also rolling out Send to Mobile, which shows users a notification to download and install the app in their mobile. For example, when one person logs in to Spotify with Facebook, Send to Mobile will ask if he wants to download and install the Spotify app on his phone.
In 2011, Facebook launched its Open Graph protocols so that app developers can let users make automatic posts about their app activity on Facebook. These automatic posts flooded News Feeds and resulted in a dull, colorless experience. With the latest changes, Facebook is clearly steering away from its original thrust of sharing anything, everything about a user's activities, no matter how mundane they may be.
