Tuesday, August 07, 2012

I know what you saw....

Worried no one is reading your group facebook posts?  Well now you can relax.  Facebook has recently launch a feature that allows users to see how many people have viewed your group post.   The way it works is whenever someone scrolls over any post in a facebook group a counter goes off indicating that said person has view the post.  Oh, and you can see exactly what time they saw the post as well.

Is this a desirable feature?  My gut response is that people generally prefer to be incognito on facebook.  Aren't group posts just a reprieve from the typical voyeuristic behavior on facebook?  The markedly insecure will at last be able to confirm than people indeed see their posts and do not respond.  The truly type A's will be able to see who ignored their follow up posts to an original post that was also ignored.

Imagine if they implemented such a feature on photo albums.  I think that would just make everyone uncomfortable.

I guess I feel they are breaking an unwritten rule of web 2.0 which is all people and activity is anonymous unless volunteer not to be (or gotten through cookies).

So take a second and enjoy the fact that I will never know you read this entire post and didn't even comment....

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Greg, just for you, I'm reading your post and commenting. :) Facebook has been making a lot of recent changes lately--it now lets brands target posts by gender and age, just in time for back-to-school; and it is now making businesses responsible for comments on their pages. This all comes a few weeks after Twitter made it possible for marketers to send targeted tweets based on location, devices and platform. Clearly targeting for advertisers is becoming better and more enabled.

As for your thought that people like to be voyeurs on Facebook and remain anonymous, we read in the book on Facebook's history that Mark Zuckerberg viewed Facebook as a place where you can't be anonymous and have to put your real self forward. People may watch others but they have to use their real identity when posting and clearly now we'll be able to tell what people are reading as well. My bet is on this working since marketers and groups will be able to better target efforts as a result of knowing who is reading what...or not reading it!

Rob Montrone said...

Facebook continues to make attempts to evolve in ways that seem to lose characteristics that drew so many people in to the site in the first place. The anonymity factor is bound to be a big deal to a lot of people who "lurk" on Facebook pages out of boredom, curiosity, what have you, and the more activity that is tracked and publicly viewable, the more people will become conscious of how they're spending their time on Facebook and what others may think of it. There was a reason that email read-receipts went out of favor very quickly after being introduced. If Facebook wants to maintain its frequent user base, the company is going to have to get a handle on which privacy issues matter most to users.