A number of years ago, I trimmed back the number of friends I had on Facebook. You can say, I turned FB into Path before there was a Path :)
This morning I went through my Facebook News Feed.
The vast majority (well over 70%) of posts came from third party apps. And a signficant percentage of those came from passive/automatic shares vs actives shares. Examples include my friends watching a Socialcam video or listening to a song on Rdio.
If I strip out all the tweets, instagram, tumblr, foursquare check ins of my FB news feed, I’m left with a mostly native FB photos.
It’s interesting to compare Facebook to things like Tumblr and Path which take a great deal of care about how things are posted.
The other day I noticed a friend ask on Path, “why do people use Path?”. Many folks replied because it’s their chance to do a Facebook do-over and start a new graph from scratch. Others said they thought Path was well designed.
I think both of those are true but for me it’s the purety of the feed. There is only one way to get things into Path. You gotta use their app. That means that all posts are there because the author intended it to be that way.
Tumblr used to have a feature where you can import RSS feeds and other content sources automatically. They still have the auto-Twitter import feed but I think that’s the only one. Tumblr’s Dashboard is extremely clean as a result and that works for me.
The interesting thing about all of this is that while I’m drawn to the pure feeds of Tumblr and Path, I tend to selectively cross post content all the time (ie sending photos from Path to Foursquare). Is that adding more noise to my friends feeds or something else?
What’s in your Facebook news feed? And do you like it that way?