Social Apps, By Default, Are Hijacking Facebook

After noticing that my friends in Facebook were posting EVERY song they listened to, EVERY video they watched and EVERY link they decided to share I was just about ready to delete my account due to all the “noise” of these lifestream sorts of postings.

Increasingly social apps like Socialcam, Spotify, Google Play and most others have set, as a default if you connect your Facebook or Twitter accounts, to go ahead and auto-post EVERYTHING the app does to your Facebook news feed! The result is a steady stream of stuff I don’t care to read or to see from an accelerating number of friends and family who are starting to use these social apps.

Socialcam's Facebook settings (click for larger view)

This morning my sister commented under a rant I did within Facebook (imploring people to go in to app settings and to please disable auto-posting to Facebook) and she pointed out she was seeing EVERYTHING posted from my Socialcam app. 

Sigh.

So I went in to Socialcam’s settings on Facebook and discovered that these were set by default:

• + Add your Facebook friends’ videos to your feed
• + Publish my Socialcam actions (Follow, Like and Comment) to Facebook
• + Publish videos I watch to Facebook.

Seriously? I kicked myself for not having taken more time when installing Socialcam — which I’d done some time ago but then deleted in favor of using another app called Klip but reinstalled it when so many of my friends started using it — and didn’t spend any time deciding what I’d allow the app to do and not do.

My bad.

The bummer is that this sort of “auto connecting” to Facebook is “EVERYONE’s bad” and newbies (or the masses who, for the most part, are not tech-savvy or aware) will quickly make Facebook more of a cluttered and horrible user experience as these “social apps” are adopted by them in droves. 

Though these default setups by social apps are undoubtedly making it easier for an app to go viral — it’s exactly what Instagram did and look at what happened to them — the result is that more and more people are becoming really agitated about this practice (like me) and will either have to go in to each app settings to find ways to turn the damn things off, or they’ll just delete the app…

…or slow their use of Facebook or delete their account altogether.