Facebook wants a bigger role in media we consume

— -- I had just found a great new song: "I Won't Let You Go" by English singer-songwriter James Morrison.

So I did what I do when this happens: I listened to it over and over again, making it louder with each spin.

Days before, I had enabled a link between my Facebook account and streaming music service Spotify, which sent each song I listened to into the real-time feed of all my Facebook friends and subscribers.

Given that this service is new, announced by Facebook just a couple weeks before, I wasn't exactly sure how it would handle a single song played on repeat. Surely it wouldn't send a fresh update with each listen.

Wrong.

All the confirmation I needed came in a comment from a Facebook friend, Aaron.

"Again?"

Content-driven ads

Facebook calls these sorts of experiences "frictionless," and it's hoping that they are the future of how we consume everything on the Web.

Each YouTube video we watch, each Netflix movie we stream, each book we read on our Kindle will soon be sent to the real-time feeds of all our Facebook friends.

These Ticker updates are disposable by nature. They don't stick around for more than a few seconds on a user's home page.

But if Facebook notices a pattern, such as three of your friends listening to the same album, it'll show you that pattern in a larger Facebook news feed item.

Facebook is hoping this sort of information furthers its role as a recommendation engine. By grouping all this data together, Facebook users can get a sorted look at the media consumption habits of their closest friends.

That could be a powerful proposition for both users and Facebook, which would hope to deliver relevant advertising alongside that information. For each of the Web services that integrate with the Facebook Ticker, the user must explicitly approve that their viewing or listening habits be broadcast. Users can also limit that information to certain groups of friends.

Spotify, too, launched a new feature that allows users to turn off the song sharing temporarily inside the program. (Perfect for that early morning Lady Gaga fix.)

Share or endorse?

This model has its issues, though.

For one, just because a user reads an article online doesn't necessarily mean he or she enjoyed it or would recommend it. Still, if sharing is approved on that Web site once by the Facebook user, each article read there would be broadcast.

And just because a user made it all the way through a YouTube video doesn't mean that he or she would endorse it.

Here, Facebook is moving beyond the deliberate "share" behavior on Facebook, which surely carries more weight with online connections.

The social network is hoping to draw connections for us -- and sell lucrative advertising -- by closely watching what we do online.

In doing so, I fear we're losing the importance of what it meant when one of us shared a link to a song, clip or news article.

Facebook thinks it can outsmart us here, but I'm not so sure it can.

We often build a wall between our true selves and our public persona -- one that we carefully craft by sharing only the most insightful or palatable content we consume.

For once, I'm not so sure full honesty is the best policy here.

Or maybe I should just tell my friends now that the new Britney Spears song makes me smile.

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Contact Mark W. Smith: msmith@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @markdubya. Follow his music listening habits by subscribing to his posts at www.facebook.com/markwsmith.