Fade out of friction-less sharing

Guardian is quietly shutting down its Facebook social reader app.  If you remember, social reader app is the app that shares what you are reading with your friends automatically.  It's akin to tracking every article that you read through social reader app, and publishing the log to all your friends.  When it first started, I posted my criticism about this "friction-less sharing."

After about a year of experimenting, Guardian is ending the social reader app program.  The reason is obvious.  As GigaOM reported, it's because Guardian realized that 1) they didn't control how their content was delivered to their end users, and 2) user experience happened all within Facebook even when user is reading a Guardian content.

At one point Facebook social reader was generating more referral than Google.
Source: http://www.insidefacebook.com

And it came crashing down when Facebook stopped showing
the spammy social reading posts on our news feed.
Source: http://gigaom.com/

Facebook is moving away from "passive sharing"

I'm sure you've seen it around on Facebook.  So-called passive sharing (also known as frictionless sharing) is when a Facebook application shares your activity, specially reading an article or watching a video, with all your friends automatically.  It was announced at F8 2011, and has been touted as a new way to share your activities.

At 2012 Online News Association, Liz Heron tweeted that Andy Mitchell from Facebook said passive sharing is something that Facebook is moving away from.  A good riddance.

Facebook moving away from passive sharing on Open Graph, Andy Mitchell says. User feedback was that signal not strong. #ONA12
— Liz Heron (@lheron) September 21, 2012