Facebook is continuing to expand its instant personalization feature today, with the addition of social reading and publishing site Scribd. Just over a week ago, Facebook added Rotten Tomatoes to the list of sites where its users would be automatically opted-in to sharing content with each other – the first addition since the introduction of the controversial feature last Spring.
When Facebook launched the feature, it started with three partner sites – Yelp, Pandora and Microsoft’s Docs.com. When Facebook recently added movie review site Rotten Tomatoes, spokesman David Swain told fellow tech blog GigaOm that new integrations into the program would be rolling out more rapidly. After a nearly five month lull between the program’s introduction, Scribd makes the fifth site to automatically cater content to Facebook users who did not chose to opt out of the program.
Facebook is calling this new partnership an opportunity for its users to “read together” by offering “reading recommendations based on what your friends are sharing and on your Facebook likes and interests”. We’re interested in seeing how this will actually play out, however. With other site integrations, we were looking at adding the context of our Facebook social graph to existing functionality. With Scribd, however, it feels like trying it’s trying to make Scribd a destination rather than a tool. For the most part, we used Scribd to easily share PDF files with each other – we didn’t go there to browse and find content. Pandora, Yelp, and Rotten Tomatoes, however, all had that aspect in common – they were destinations that could be enhanced by Facebook’s instant personalization feature.
Nonetheless, we think that the importance of this addition lies in the fact that it evidences Facebook’s commitment to expanding its instant personalization program. After several months of lying dormant, we have two new additions and we expect to see more in the near future. We have to wonder how long it will be until instant personalization becomes the default, rather than the exception. When might sites stop implementing their own Facebook integrations and sign on to have users automatically integrated the second they show up?
