People sharing less personal information on Facebook
Looking back on Facebook’s feature, “On This Day,” it bores me to see just how boring I was 9 years ago. Several updates a day on what I was eating, drinking, thinking about doing, wishing I was doing. Yawn. But it would seem that the generation of Facebook users who once couldn’t get through a whole meal without sharing it has taken to doing just the opposite.
It has been reported that Facebook officials are getting pretty scared about the downward trend of sharing personal information online.
Of course, people are still sharing and bombarding their friends with information, but are more likely to share news about the outside world and links to other websites, rather than what’s going on in their personal lives.
The change is a worry for Facebook because of what, internally, is called “context-collapse,” which IRL terms is the trend of people towards smaller social sites to document their personal lives; Snapchat and Instagram being perfect examples.
Staff at Facebook are being encouraged to come up with news ways to encourage users to share, and new features aim to do this – the previously mentioned On This Day feature and the update for the smartphone app, which creates albums at the top of your feed for you, are all ways in which Facebook is desperately trying to get you to share, share share!
What do you think? Have you noticed this in your newsfeed? Let us know! And give us a follow on Facebook too, if you haven’t already!