Just weeks after the tweaks to auto-sharing feature in Instagram app, Facebook is all set to take the plans further in favor of “explicitly shared stories” over the ones shared automatically by third party apps in News Feed.
The company on Tuesday announced that the number of implicit stories has dropped in the past year, but still it requires certain tweaks in its algorithm to “prioritize explicitly shared stories.”
“We’ve found that stories people choose to explicitly share from third party apps are typically more interesting and get more engagement in News Feed than stories shared from third party apps without explicit action,” Facebook said in a blog post.
“We’ve also heard that people often feel surprised or confused by stories that are shared without taking an explicit action. In the coming months, we will continue to prioritize explicitly shared stories from apps in News Feed over implicitly shared stories.”
However, Facebook is not planning to give up on auto-sharing and it will still continue “implicit sharing” from third-party apps, but with very little emphasis. With this move, automatically posted stories from apps like Farmville and Spotify are going to show up less in the users’ News Feed.
The change is actually a counter to Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision of a Facebook world – where everything you eat, see, do, listen, play, pin, or visit gets automatically shared in real time.
Facebook rolled out such automatic updates from third-party apps as part of its 2011 Timeline update. The company added gestures such as “read,” “watch” and “listen,” specifically designed to share users’ real-time activities in the feed.
