Facebook Actions: Social Sharing On Steroids

Now that Facebook’s Timeline is almost completely rolled out to the masses, it’s only a matter of time before the final piece of the Open Graph puzzle is put in place. Facebook’s Open Graph includes three main elements: the Timeline profile design. Live Feed Ticker  and  ‘Actions’. So what are ‘Actions’? Actions can technically be anything the developer of the Action desires. Facebook users have already seen several Actions buzzing through their feed. For example, thanks to Spotify and social reading apps for online publications like The Washington Post, users are painstakingly notified of each and every song their friends listen to and every news article they read. Although most users find notifications an annoyance, they play into Facebook’s master plan: frictionless sharing. Facebook wants to automate and streamline sharing every detail of your online life making the process seamless, almost invisible. In conjunction with actions, Facebook is releasing a series of ‘Timeline apps’ which according to Founder Mark Zuckerberg will “help tell the story of you life” on your Timeline. And unless you change Spotify’s default settings, your music ‘story’ already authors itself on your Facebook Timeline. With the release of Timeline apps & more detailed Action buttons, there’s no doubt that more details of your online life will become just as socially automated. Eventually we will all begin seeing what our Facebook friends are eating, wearing, where they run, what movies they watch, and whatever other action developers end up creating. The question becomes, who really cares?