Facebook is indeed allowing us to speculate about the future of social networking with its new changes and road-maps. Their most ingenious feature, the Timeline has been praised by all as it provides a simple and easy way for your friends or contact to view a section or whole of your life on Facebook. Another important feature is the Open Graph protocol which is designed for the new era of social apps which will broadcast your actions and your life to your contacts and friends.
All this was much appreciated but the important question is being raised by many people -Are these new features making Content curation and discovery invalid? The answer is complicated.
Auto sharing of your content to people rids you of effort to figure out what to share with whom but this same ‘figuring out’ is needed to ensure that a particularly naughty joke doesn’t reach your grandmother or some other relatives? This is what is being called the ‘Freaky Line’ by Richard Scoble. Facebook has permeated deep into people’s social structures so much so that what you will find on someone’s Facebook profile is much more than when you interact personally with them. People will probably in the current scenario become their personal PR agency and stop doing certain things completely because they have no control on it being shared everywhere, which will make life a dull and boring affair.
These new apps that we speak off are for now music listening services, social readers etc. which do not penetrate much into your life but wait till the next wave of apps release and you will be sharing almost everything with your contacts. This is a scary situation from the point of view of a person who is not the biggest champion of sharing and prefers that only some aspects of his life are known to others. Some of us will drop off the social media grid completely and will only be on IM and email. It is indeed possible that after reaching such critical mass of over-sharing, the Social Networking Bubble might burst. It is just a probable outcome and there is no need to be alarmed!
Coming back to root of the problem, we agree that content discovery is being slowly pushed out in favor of automatic content discovery. This automatic content discovery is based solely on your preferences and interests that you display on your social networks. The boom of content on the web is phenomenal. You will take some 600 years to view all the content on Youtube back to back! So now its up to you to decide whether you want to discover or be fed content automatically?
Another aspect is Content sharing and publishing. I strongly feel that users should have control over what they want to share and when. Automatic publishing by apps cannot be controlled right now. Unless Facebook issues some kind of content sharing control on these apps the situation will spiral towards chaos. This is what Vic Gundotra , Senior VP of Google has to say on Content Curation. We have to agree with him. At no point in time should we idly sit by and allow control be taken from our hands.
What do you think about this issue? Do let us know.
