The Friction in Frictionless Sharing

[...]Instead of requiring the user to confirm every single article they choose to share, just give them a one-time dialog that enables them to share everything down the road.

That’s a lot less work for the user, right?

Well, no, not really. Because in the past the user only had to decide whether to share something they just read, but now they have to think about every single article before they even read it. If I read this article, then everyone will know I read it, and do I really want people to know I read it?

That creates more friction, not less.

-Nick Bradbury: The Friction in Frictionless Sharing

He makes a good point, but my objection to Facebook’s ‘frictionless’ sharing is more basic than that: if you’re sharing everything, isn’t that the same as just sharing nothing at all?

And just who out there is really interested in every single thing someone reads? That kind of all-inclusive information might seem useful to an FBI profiler trying to identify a serial killer, or to creepy stalkers* trying to learn your habits, but to your friends? I mean, I love my friends, but I couldn’t give a damn about 99% of what they read online, and I’m sure none of them care about 99% of the stuff I read either. I might care about the 1% they think is actually interesting, and one way of knowing that is if they made a conscious effort to share it.

Any effort to streamline sharing only serves to lower the standards for that which gets shared.

* Also known as advertisers.

In 1791, riled by a recent review that criticised a supposed abundance of “obscure language” and “imperfect grammar” in his poetry, celebrated Scottish poet Robert Burns channelled his anger and wrote the following magnificent letter to the critic responsible.

It really is a thing of beauty.

After waiting for so long to see the numbers inside Facebook’s success, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by all the new data we have about the social network and company. But there is one number that matters more than all the others:

Revenue per monthly active user: $4.39*

Might seem impressive, until you add up the numbers:

However, even if Facebook gets to 3 billion users, if it doesn’t increase its revenue per user, the company will only generate $13 billion in revenue per year, as analyst Trip Chowdry has pointed out. That’s not going to justify a market capitalization of $100 billion. Google, for example, generated $38 billion in revenue — nearly three times Facebook’s hypothetical three-billion-user hypothetical — and has a market cap of $190 billion.

I smell another tech-bubble.

For more on the same topic, see the Photoshop Etiquette Manifesto.

So I’ve got a confession to make: When we started working on the new Boston Globe website, we had never designed a responsive site before.

Pretty impressive, considering the Globe is one of the best examples of responsive web-design out there.

Let’s take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach. I’ll whip out my map and draw our route down the coast…

The line is about 400 miles long, we can walk 4 miles per hour for 10 hours per day, so we’ll be there in 10 days. We call our friends and book dinner for next Sunday night, when we will roll in triumphantly at 6 p.m. They can’t wait!

It’s easy not to “be evil” when you’re ahead. But when you’re backed into a corner and your usual strategies aren’t working, it’s easy to get frustrated, scared, and angry, and throw previously held morals and standards out the window.

I’m getting increasingly anxious about being so reliant on my Gmail account.

Information (content) does not want to be free.  Instead, information just wants to be distributed friction-free.  That’s a big difference, and also the massive opportunity that should be at the center right now.

Exactly. You’d think Big Media would’ve learnt the lesson from iTunes by now: people are more than happy to pay for content if it’s more convenient than pirating it. Sadly, it appears they still haven’t, as they continue to add sources of friction (DRM, mandatory anti-piracy commercials, region-locking, etc…) that only seem to hinder legitimate customers, yet do nothing to stop or even slow down piracy.

Facebook states that its mission is to make the world a more open and connected place, yet this isn’t the exclusive domain of Facebook, it’s a consequence of the open network it’s built on — the web. Whilst social networks have made it easier for people to communicate online, Facebook is attempting to go further by deeply integrating its closed, proprietary network into the fabric of the web. With products like Connect, Social Plugins and OpenGraph, Facebook has become a parasite, suffocating the platform that hosts it.

A well written and scathing polemic by Paul Robert Lloyd. I found myself agreeing with most of this, but one of the last paragraphs is perhaps just a tad much:

Now Facebook is hoovering up many of the best designers in our industry. As new features continue to encourage users to hand over more personal information, its designers have become devil’s advocates. Much like producing advertising campaigns for cigarette companies, working for Facebook has become an ethically questionable career move.

Ethics in design is a difficult topic, but I think this might be a bit of a stretch – it’s not like Facebook is killing millions of people or enslaving millions more with its highly addictive… Wait. Yeah, I guess I can see some parallels there after all. Still.