Frictionless Facebook Apps Increasing Content Sharing

During a time where the hot topic everywhere is about the Internet piracy act protection bill “SOPA”, some of the major Internet companies like, Wikipedia, reddit and Mozilla are protesting the bill.

On the other hand, the giant in social networking, Facebook, is rolling out changes to get its users more social on the site by introducing their new feature known as “Frictionless Apps”. Facebook is anticipating that this new feature will ultimately increase content sharing on their site.

Most of the sites already have the widget installed on their websites through which a user can easily share content to his/her friends on Facebook. For using the widgets available, the user just needs to perform an action and the content is directly posted to their wall on Facebook.

Frictionless apps, as the name suggests, doesn’t prompt the user to perform any sharing action. When an application is installed and the user is asked to permit the application to access the information required, this is the point where the feature requires the action from the user i.e. to accept. Afterwards ‘it is frictionless’.

Frictionless apps can bring you and your friends together. As the content sharing will be high with these apps, and you can see what your friends are doing right now. The user’s interests will be shared among their friends and they will be shown relevant content based on their Likes.

The information sharing is very easy. If your friend is reading an article, you will be able to view the activity on his Facebook timeline or either on the ticker (which is another feature Facebook launched for users to know what their friends are doing right at that very moment). Facebook’s project manager ‘Carl Sjogreen’ revealed the frictionless apps in a media event in San Francisco. He also said that these applications will share the content automatically and instantaneously after the user provides the permission to do so. The best designed apps in the frictionless category so far includes Social Reader, Angry Birds, Spotify and The Washington Post.

Angry Birds, as we all know is from one of the most popular games on multiple platforms. The game has made its way to Facebook as well. Users play the game and without any action their scores are shared to the timeline. Friends are also notified through the ticker that user is playing Angry Birds on Facebook, which generates more users for the app and more content to share for Facebook.

Social Reader, where users can read about the latest news, gossips, entertainment, and articles on different topics is also one of the most refined frictionless apps. When a user is reading an article on Social Reader, it generates a post on to the user’s timeline stating that the user is reading an article on this topic. Friends also see the update on ticker that user is reading an article and a wall post is also generated to the friend’s Facebook wall.

Spotify, an application to listen to songs, which lets the user share whenever the user is listening to a song. Friends receive notification thorough the ticker and Facebook wall posts for the activity the user has perfomed on Spotify i.e. which song the user is listening to.

Facebook will launch sixty (60) frictionless apps as the starting point (with the other applications already available) in the coming days. Sjogreen also announced that expedited application process is available to application developers on the developer’s page of Facebook.

According to Zuckerburg (CEO Facebook), Frictionless apps are a completely new class of social apps, which would allow users to share “a magnitude more”, as all the sharing is automatic rather than manual.

Facebook has also launched a video providing an introduction about the frictionless apps and its main purpose of bringing the people together and to get them to communicate online.