Farhad Manjoo, on the money as usual about Facebook’s new changes and, in particular, the “ticker” feature:
Zuckerberg calls this “frictionless” sharing. What he means is that I don’t have to bother with the “friction” of choosing to tell you that I like something. On Facebook, now, merely experiencing something is enough to trigger sharing. Once I sign up for Spotify’s Facebook app, my consent is assumed: When I listen, I share. The same goes for the many other apps that Facebook’s partners are launching. When I watch something on Netflix or Hulu, when I read something on the Daily, or when I play a game like Words With Friends, Facebook will tell my friends. Everyone I know on Facebook will now have a running log of my life.
This is a nightmare, but not for the reasons you might suspect. I don’t hate this new model because of its lack of “privacy,” or due to Facebook’s clear financial interest in collecting my personal information…My problem with “frictionless sharing” is much more basic: Facebook is killing taste.