When [Facebook] breaks the web
There’s been an interesting conversation around Anil Dash’s “Facebook is Gaslighting the Web” post. His argument:
Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users’ ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence that this is true even for sites which embrace Facebook technologies is overwhelming, and the net result is that Facebook is gaslighting users into believing that visiting the web is dangerous or threatening.
In a followup piece, he cites correspondence with several Facebook engineers. One describes the “linkshim” warning message that first raised Anil’s ire as a bug that they’re working on fixing. Another explains that this case in particular was an accident, but that “we have to balance false positives such as the one you saw with the damage that can occur if spammers can exploit our users’ trust of Facebook URLs.”
They’re both reasonable points. I want to point out, though, that this isn’t the only example of this type of behavior on Facebook’s part.
Partners in Facebook’s new Custom Open Graph initiative (yeah, that’s actually COG) can automatically broadcast activity from authenticated users back to Facebook. It’s this behavior that led to the “Facebook is ruining sharing” vs. “Facebook is the future of sharing” brouhaha.
In presenting those (auto)shared links in the newsfeed, though, Facebook introduces a new navigation convention. Rather than directing the user directly to the destination, clicking a link surfaces the new Facebook Connect authentication dialog within the Facebook site itself.
Here’s an example. First, the links from the Washington Post:
Click on one, and what happens?
I work with Facebook pretty closely, and we are partners in the new Facebook COG. They’ve been clear that what they’re calling “on-site authentication” (or thereabouts) converts at a much higher rate than a standard Facebook Connect implementation that lives on the publisher app’s website.
From a user experience perspective, though, this breaks a fundamental part of the web. And as the number of cases in which Facebook breaks web navigation standards grows, it becomes harder to ascribe noble motives or even excuse the decisions they’re making. Facebook has almost a billion users. Any service operating at this scale is responsible, in a very real way, for the behaviors that they teach their users. When you operate at this scale and start making decisions like these, you run a very real risk of making the entire web worse. That’s a longer conversation, though.
