Share Buttons? Ha. Facebook Just Schooled The Internet. Again.

This article is annoyingly breathless about these new features.<p>I seem to stubbornly remain in the minority by thinking that, in the long term, Facebook doesn't matter. It's fluff. It's wildly popular, people love it, but it's still fluff. People like fluff.<p>The timeline is nice. It's... yeah, it's nice. I get it. And people will use it and love it, but it doesn't change a damn thing about the world. It's just nice.<p>Automatically sharing what you're playing on Spotify with your friends? Sure, that's nice... and companies will go crazy about what this means for virality and engagement and all those fun words. But ultimately, it's fluff.<p>Does any of that come even CLOSE to justifying "Facebook pulled an Apple"? Comparing the smartphone and tablet future as imagined by Apple, with all that implies in terms of accessibility and availability of computing, to... a digital scrapbook and a music ticker?

Funny how you can always pick the TC headlines.<p>Anyhow, I thought this was interesting regardless. The last section sounds like sharing by default and it doesn't strike me as revolutionary, just creepy. Guess what, I don't want everything I do to be automatically shared with my 'friends', because for the most part they don't care, and in some cases I don't want (some of them) to know.<p>To finish off, the "Facebook has been kicking ass and <i>taking names</i>." line at the start is sounding decidedly disturbing in recent times with all the kerfuffle about real names from mobs like Blizzard and Google.

So the replacement for me manually hitting 'share' when I want to share things is to share everything?<p>Signal to noise ratio. I sent out a few updates that I think are important and I want my friends to know about. I don't blast them with every fool song I listen to, tv show I watch, or underwear I wear. I only send them what I want them to know about.

In this Google v. Facebook thing people seem to forget that G+ isn't Google's core business but Facebook is Facebook's so the bigger investment in social is going to come from them.

Sometimes I think this whole "G+ is gonna take over Facebook" mentality is just nonsense that the media themselves are trying to spread, not regular folks like us... Yes, people do think G+ has potential, but there's hardly anyone making a commotion about how it will overtake FB. It's just mostly people who want linkbait.