December 21, 2011

Yahoo | TechCrunch
Yahoo is expanding its integration of Facebook’s frictionless sharing system across 26 additional sites, after seeing it produce 1 million shares and 500,000 referrals a day to its U.S. news site.

TechCrunch asked Yahoo’s head of social and personalization, Mike Kerns, about the notion that automatic sharing of everything people read is ruining the value of thoughtful sharing. He answered: “The younger demographic is totally comfortable with a persistent state of sharing. People should be comfortable as themselves.”

Yahoo offers robust controls and reminders for a user’s auto-sharing to Facebook.

I’d say that issue is still far from settled, but I also commend Yahoo for offering very clear settings on the top-right of every Yahoo News page that remind me I’m logged into Facebook, tell me whether social sharing is on or off, and give me controls such as deleting an article from my shared activity. That’s a best practice others should follow.

Earlier: News orgs reaching millions through frictionless sharing (Poynter.org) | The problems of frictionless sharing (Poynter.org)

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Jeff Sonderman (jsonderman@poynter.org) is the Digital Media Fellow at The Poynter Institute. He focuses on innovations and strategies for mobile platforms and social media in…
Jeff Sonderman

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