After facebook’s announcements last week around the new version of OpenGraph (version 3), many have been scared of an increased invasion of privacy about facebook recording and displaying, for the world to see, your activity as you browse around the web. Sparked by the release by certain media outlets of features where as you browse their websites each action is relayed to your facebook timeline.
Myth #1: Facebook is implementing this functionality
Actually, Facebook have only created an API for apps and sites to post actions to your history, and have done so in a very controlled way. The actions must contain an approved verb (eg: read/listened-to/played), an approved type (article/tv show/song) and cannot be anything outside of those bounds. The new actions API contains a sufficiently descriptive permission model for users of each app in front of that. It is the apps/sites you should direct your frustration at if you don’t want them to send every interaction you do to facebook. Indeed, I think these sites should offer more control – a compromise between fully automatic sending of actions, and a button similar to the like button.
In fact, facebook could have done so much worse. Due to the success of the facebook like button, facebook could have had the ability to record literally every article you visit on every site which implements the like button (lots) without asking for any persmission at all, or changing any code on your site. They had the power to know, without permission, everywhere a logged-in facebook user visits, but they chose to make this a push mechanism for content publishers. If you don’t like the fact that once you connect with Yahoo News or Spotify, every article you read or every song you listen to will be recorded forever on your Timeline, then you have to blame Yahoo or Spotify. Genius.
Myth #2: Anything I do on the web now will be recorded on my Timeline
Again, this depends on how media publishers intend to use facebook’s new API. Sometimes it will make sense to post actions without user interaction each time (listening to a song for example), and sometimes it won’t (imdb doesn’t know if you actually watched a movie, until you press their new watch button [this doesn't exist, I made it up]), but it’s all in the control of the publisher.
This is the evolution of the like button, the old profile Apps, and the facebook beacon combined
Facebook apps – the ones which created the mess of boxes and videos on people’s profiles, which quickly got removed a year or two ago allowed more identity to creep through, but in an extremely uncontrolled manner (developers could post pretty much any html in any layout they wanted). Now, developers don’t write any html on your profile – the actions your app sends to facebook are sent as data in a very specific manner, and how that is displayed and used on people’s Timelines is presented to you as 4 facebook-controlled options.
Like Button – as I mentioned already, the like button was a precursor to all this – 1 simple button which automatically likes a Url on the web. The like button could be reimplemented within the new OpenGraph API, but likely won’t be yet because of the fact you don’t need to give a website permission to have a like button which knows about you on it.
Facebook beacon – actually, facebook have been trying to achieve what they’ve done this week for a while, starting with facebook beacon. Through that experience, it’s obvious Facebook learnt a lot about the direction they would need to take in order to get to their destination of becoming the central point for digital identity, sharing and discovery – and that direction is one where they share the resposibility with content providers.
Like it or not, this is the direction the web is going if you want to take part in its social features and, personally, I love it.
It’s definitely going to be an interesting time as we see how different content publishers embrace the new OpenGraph features – will wordpress.com implement an integration for their x hosted blogs? What about content publishers who have tried to do similar social/content mixing before – will iTunes give up on Ping and embrace facebook, or Microsoft connect Zune to facebook (their music and movie streaming is good but their social never took off)?
If Timeline is something to embrace as a cloud storage of my life events, and it’s to be a complete picture – then I’d like to see all the above, plus some interesting ways to push content to timeline from other mediums – TV shows and cinema, sports events (RunKeeper/MapMyRun), and trips for example, but I’d also like to see great tools for me to curate that information and powerful ways for facebook to amalgamate all my data, analyse it, and show interesting angles on my Timeline.
