It is official. Social sharing through the likes of Facebook and Yahoo is ‘doing my head in.’ It is doing so on two levels, the first is that my FB feed is full of shit articles and videos from people that I used to know 25 years ago and then we had a trip down memory lane and friended each other. We have little in common and I don’t care what they read. Second, everytime in this flotsum I see the one nice piece of driftwood and I go to click on it, I have the equivalent of being asked to ‘stand and deliver’ my password.

They call this frictionless sharing, well call me old fashioned but to me frictionless means not having to stop and do something, I remember the days when if I saw a link and clicked on it, I actually got to read it straight away without giving something up. Worse still I believe many people dont even know that they have just published the fact they are looking at Yahoo’s top ten bikini models to all and sundry, it is not clear enough and saying that it is made clear on line 78 of the T&Cs does not count.

As an example, I once read an article that was shared on Facebook – I think it was about astro physics or something like that (standard fare) and I could not work out how it got there. I went and looked at my Yahoo profile and found that because I had set up the link between Flickr and Facebook for photo sharing I had given them permission to share anything I read on Yahoo. That in my view is not right and ranks up there with companies asking people to opt out of correspondence, another of my irritations.

I think it makes the whole web experience feel spammy and underhand and I think it asks questions of the Facebook open graph becoming too influential and interruptive, time will tell but it appears that many of the stats show that consumers are choosing more and more to not share what they read, eat, think and would in actual fact like to read ‘soap operas top 10 best deaths’ in peace.