Mark Zuckerberg wants you to live your life out loud on his platform. The expansion of Facebook Gestures will make it possible to share much more of your daily life with your Facebook friends.
Gestures uses the Open Graph idea, which automatically tells your friends what you are doing in almost real-time. These are those posts in the right-hand Ticker that say, “Sally is listening to Lady Gaga.” Hulu, Spotify and The Washington Post were early adopters of this functionality, which came into existence last fall at the f8 developers’ conference.
The expansion of this functionality means that users will give permission to access 3rd party apps and then have their activities broadcast indefinitely. These notices will appear automatically in the Ticker and, based on a secret formula, the more important ones might get into your Newsfeed wall.
The idea behind all this is to optimize sharing and eliminate the hesitation that the near ubiquitous Like button creates, since its an explicit endorsement or approval of content. Instead by creating these automatic apps, you can share what you’re doing without assigning a value or judgment. This frictionless sharing will extend from what you are reading, watching or listening to into an unlimited number of personal areas. In no time verbs like, cooked, ate, went to, saw, visited, tried on, hiked, fished, hunted, inhaled, extruded, ran, bought, flashed or swallowed will pop up in your Ticker.
And while many of us are already at the TMI level, Zuck & Company are operating on the assumption that we are endlessly curious about all the details and nuances of our friends lives. This is tied to the assumption that if “birds of a feather flock together,” Facebook can target and sell wholesale access to distinct flocks for advertisers.
Surprisingly this stream of personal information might just make sense for retail brands and brands who rely on habitual, seasonal or repeat businesses. Imagine a million people daily seeing that their friends “ate a Dave’s Hot ‘N Juicy Hamburger at Wendy’s” or “bought 6 cups of Chobani pineapple yogurt” or “downed a six pack of Bud Light.” Assuming that we share a psycho-demographic sensibility with most of our friends this kind of advertising, even assuming the impressions have less attention-per-post, might be much more persuasive and even more directive than traditional online or offline ad formats.
And so the newest Facebook gesture just might be double-jointed.
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