Facebook updates for Common Kitchen
Since things have been bubbling quite publicly over at Facebook recently, I thought I’d post an update about Common Kitchen’s presence on Facebook and where we are with our application and other Facebook activity.
First, some progress: we have a “page” now, so you can become a “fan” of Common Kitchen. I think Facebook created these “pages” as a way to avoid the phenomenon of “fakesters,” where people create false profiles as stand-ins for companies, mascots, etc. (or less commercial concepts.) We’re not really sure what being a “fan” of Common Kitchen will mean in the long run, but we’ll see what we can do to make it a positive experience.
Second, we’ve “published” our application, which means it shows up in Facebook’s official lists of applications. It’s seen a fair amount of traffic since then, which is good news and actually a little surprising to us, given that (*cough*) it doesn’t do much yet. Mostly, it attempts to push your activity on Common Kitchen (posting reviews, etc.) into your Facebook news feed, and it puts a link to Common Kitchen in your profile.
What’s interesting here is that Facebook’s new (and controversial) “Beacon” service has pretty much the same function of our application: if we were to sign up for Beacon, we could use that to publish the same information to your news feed or mini-feed, and presumably with more consistency (because we’d be paying for it.) This does make us question where the Common Kitchen application is headed in the long run: what can we do with it to provide the greatest utility to our users? Right now, the answer to that is unclear, so we don’t have (m)any immediate plans for it.
Beacon, on the other hand, seems like a bad bet until Facebook irons out its many problems. For one thing, its opt-out nature is troubling; you would have to tell Facebook not to publish Common Kitchen stories, unlike our application, where adding the application is an affirmative action on your part. (We doubt too many Common Kitchen feed stories would be something you’d want to hide, but the principle stands.) The opt-out process has been poorly handled by Facebook and still has major issues, but they’re getting better. For another, there’s a lot of troubling information floating around suggesting that Beacon, even if it’s not publishing to your news feed, is helping Facebook track your online activity outside its own domain. Nothing Google, Microsoft and Amazon haven’t been doing for years, of course (yes, I have the Alexa Firefox extension installed, thanks) but a bit disturbing without an opt-in.
So for the time being, we’re staying on the course we’ve already plotted. We’ll keep you posted if and when it changes.
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