Spotify was essential to Facebook’s frictionless sharing plan. But not every app is down for cluttering news feeds with moment-to-moment information about what its users are doing, saying, thinking and listening to.
Music streaming service Pandora, for one, is staying out of Facebook’s social apps completely. “It’s true that music is a social experience, but it’s also a very private experience,” Pandora founder Tim Westergren recently told CNN. “We have to be very cautious.”
Yesterday, Facebook announced 60 new social apps for Timeline, which aim to “enhance” users’ timelines with apps that “help you tell your story, whether you love to cook, eat, travel, run, or review movies.”
Some of the new social apps include food-photo app Foodspotting, recipe app Foodily, ticket-buying app Ticketmaster, the visually oriented social network Pinterest, movie-reviewing site Rotten Tomatoes, and travel site TripAdvisor.
The open graph push officially happened on Wednesday, but news made its way around the tech news world on Tuesday.
At f8 last year, Zuckerberg laid out the future of social apps: “We think that people are going to want to share all kinds of things with their lives and we think that apps are the way they want to show them.”
Because, believes Zuckerberg, “no activity is too big or small to share.”
Not everyone agrees. Not all information is public, and it’s up to the user to decide what they feel comfortable “sharing,” opting-out if necessary. Our own John Paul Titlow turned off his Facebook Spotify integration months ago.
Listening to music alone, either on a jog or just laying in bed, is one of those meditative experiences. So is reading articles that are longer than 500 words. Instapaper is one avenue for that long-form reading experience. Users can, of course, share the stories they’ve instapaper’ed out to Facebook and Twitter. But would Instapaper ever consider a Facebook social app?
“I don’t believe that people want to auto-share everything they read without some other manual filter in front of it,” replies Instapaper founder Marco Arment.
