Facebook’s new Frictionless Sharing has started some conversations about what Social Sharing really is.
Items
Digital Sharing has a history that is mostly Item based. I’ll start with email (though sharing existed before) to limit the discussion to digital forms of sharing. Email was (and still is) used as a method of sharing Items. If you find something interesting, you can email a link or copy the content into an email. As Social Sharing grew with Social Networks, sharing has mostly followed this similar path. An explicit action is required to distribute the item of interest to my followers.
Items
Digital Sharing has a history that is mostly Item based. I’ll start with email (though sharing existed before) to limit the discussion to digital forms of sharing. Email was (and still is) used as a method of sharing Items. If you find something interesting, you can email a link or copy the content into an email. As Social Sharing grew with Social Networks, sharing has mostly followed this similar path. An explicit action is required to distribute the item of interest to my followers.
Item based sharing is meant to be received Item by Item. Email lands in an inbox till read. Items in Google Reader remain as unread till viewed by the user. Streams are designed to show a current view, and typically do not provide the user a method to start where they last left off.
Google+ seeks to refine the Item based social sharing, and their Circles method of selective sharing does a good job to refine the per Item flow.
Streams
Facebook is seeking a different type of sharing, one focused on Streams. In this model of sharing, shared items are not filtered, and the emphasis is on the Stream, not the Item. The value of each item is much less then Item sharing, but the value of the stream itself is more powerful with the constant flow of data.
Facebook is seeking a different type of sharing, one focused on Streams. In this model of sharing, shared items are not filtered, and the emphasis is on the Stream, not the Item. The value of each item is much less then Item sharing, but the value of the stream itself is more powerful with the constant flow of data.
Stream based sharing is not a progression from Item based sharing, but a new type of sharing enabled by the proliferation of APIs and web technologies.
Confusion
The current problem with Social Sharing is confusion between these two sharing types. Users and Services alike remain confused about which they are, causing flaws in design and misuse by users. Social Noise is a result of including Streams in an Item system. Other examples of sharing confusion:
- Google+ is an Item sharing service, but provides no easy way to resume from your previous place in the list of posts.
- Facebook is a stream sharing service, but provides no way for users to extract value from the stream in aggregate form. Pandora (through it’s Facebook partnership) should offer a Station based on the recently listened items from my social contacts.
- Google Latitude has both Items (places I explicitly check in) and Streams (Places I am checked in automatically), but does not offer tools to handle these types of sharing differently.
- Endomondo is a workout tracking and sharing service. They make no differentiation between Items and Streams, though some of my workouts are Items (an epic bike ride) and some are Streams (my daily bike commute).
Litmus Test
Do you care if you miss an update? If you do, you are likely treating that as an Item. If you only care about what’s recent, then a Stream is more appropriate.
Now
We need to learn how to distinguish between these (and future) types of sharing, and learn how to best use each type. Something New isn’t necessarily Bad.