Facebook News Apps Open Firehose of Pageviews
This is my fourth (and final) blog post assignment for my Journalism course. It’s kind of an op-ed in its own right, though not something I was likely to bother writing about if not for the assignment. Back in September, at its f8 conference, Facebook announced a new kind of app, with the ability to use “frictionless sharing”—basically a fancy way of saying that users’ activity can be shared without users specifically clicking a “Share” button. The first reaction to this announcement was lukewarm at best. As users began to notice just how much activity was being shared, they complained…