Frictionless sharing: One man's meat is another man's poison, as the old adage goes.
When Facebook first announced the launch of social graph and frictionless sharing, brands were slow to pick up on the advantage that these features offered. Though 2011 could really be called the year of frictionless sharing, the impact of the feature is still beginning to surface.
Spotify was one of the first to capitalize on frictionless sharing, and the service has grown leaps and bounds since them - along with frictionless sharing. Now, many brands have integrated frictionless sharing into their Facebook apps. Pinterest, Hulu, Rdio and the swarm of social readers and video apps, from the Washington Post Reader and Yahoo! News to Viddy and SocialCam, are just a few of the many frictionless sharing apps.
While some consumers find frictionless sharing a bothersome and invasive addition, others have embraced the trend. One thing, however, is clear: hate it or love it, the Facebook frictionless sharing feature is here to stay. As more and more apps turn to frictionless sharing to promote stories on Facebook, here are some of the best new apps using the feature.
Songza: Although Songza has been around as a web application for several years, it only released a mobile app at the beginning of this month. As for the service itself, Songza takes a different approach to music streaming. Whereas Spotify is a music database that makes any song accessible to listen at any time on its desktop version, Songza is like Pandora with pre-curated "Mood" playlists. With the ability to find playlists based on your mood, you can tell Songza to play you music that's classified as anything from sprightly and spacey to cocky or earthy. As far as frictionless sharing is concerned, the app shares the title of the playlist you list to; anyone who clicks on the title is taken to a page where they can open Songza and listen to the playlist as well.
Wanderfly: Wanderfly offers user-curated lists of travel destinations. Create a page for a location, then leave reviews, share photos, and save destinations in any city. For those with any inkling of wanderlust, the most dangerous part of this app is the ability to check flights and hotels for any city. After perusing gorgeous photos of any location, Wanderfly tempts any traveler with the ease of booking the next vacation. The frictionless sharing options on Wanderfly allow you to share the places you've been, and the places you're going, with your Facebook community.
Cinemagram: Cinemagram is a relatively new app that's taken image and video sharing one step further, by combining them. In other words, Cinemagram sets photos in motion, but only pieces of them. With Cinegram, users record short videos, then highlight a section of that video that should continue to move when its published: the rest of the video stays still. Record a video of someone shooting a basketball, and you can make the basketball the only moving part of the image. With frictionless sharing - a newly introduced feature or the app - you can share your Cinemagrams instantly to your Facebook wall.
Snapguide: With Snapguide, users put together step-by-step insctructions for how to do anything. The guides include photos and text to lead you through any process. Searching through their database of how-to guides, you might find instructions on how to build a bicycle, or how to make perfect pancakes. Vote on your favorite guides, or the ones you find the most helpful. Then, create your own and share them with your social networks. With frictionless sharing, friends can see the guides you're using, then submit their own tips.
Fancy: This app is the shopoholic's delight. An online magazine that tempts users with beautiful images of almost anything, you can save items to lists, "Fancy" them, or leave comments for other people viewing the item. If you fancy something enough, there's even a link to buy the item on the app. The things you fancy most can be sent directly to Facebook via frictionless sharing, if you have it enabled.
With frictionless sharing becoming a more prominent feature with all socially integrated web and mobile applications, for consumers it's best to understand how to manage those sharing settings as to not broadcast unwanted information or activity. Always read the permissions of an app before connecting and allowing sharing.
What's been your experience with Facebook frictionless sharing? Leave your thoughts about frictionless sharing in the comments below.
Thomas Samph is a writer at Grovo.com, an online Internet education and training platform, where you'll find everything from Tumblr tips to Google Analytics tutorials.