Facebook "Blog It" app cheapens content Apr17 '08

Six Apart recently announced "Blog It" - a utility for Facebook that lets you post content to various other social networks or blogging sites - right from within Facebook.

Screenshot of Facebook

We think Blog It brings some of the best social aspects of Facebook to blogging, making it easy to blog from within Facebook and tell people you know all around the web that you're doing so.

This is good idea, but unacknowledged are the unintentional hideous results. This concept will only add to the clutter of lethargic redundancy throughout social networks. It desensitizes content.

A good quote from Andy at Pain in the Tech:

This mass spam system undermines the different types of communities and users. ... and violates a related form of social responsibility in that it doesn't encourage and foster differences and creativity, just "Abuse" of disparate systems that the user can exploit for much exposure for some kind of perceived advantage, but everyone loses from the homogeneity.

In other words, this is a cheap and easy way to "spam" all of your social networks with updates that don't hold any value unique to that specific network.

Each social network you join should do something for you. Whether it makes you a better content publisher, or helps you meet more like-minded people - it's the value of the network that makes it worthwhile. It's not about how many different networks you join, or how quickly or easily you can update them simultaneously. People that join as many social networks as possible, and then proceed to mass update each network with the same message, only decrease their overall message intent.

For example, if you have a Tumblr account, and you truly find advantages to using that network, you should be able to update your Tumblr site through direct means, ie: visiting your Tumblr dashboard and updating the way the application was built to be updated. If you can't find the time to do that, and your Tumblr account is only useful if you can update it through Facebook, you don't need a Tumblr account.

This Facebook "Blog It" app essentially lessens the value of every social network it auto-posts to.

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Categories: Content , Facebook , Social Networking

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