Facebook Integration (or "Sharing on the network everyone's on")

idea
#1

FB integration is still lacking. This is key for me because sharing news is how I discover other news. And I don’t want to bother with sharing across 2 (or 3, 4, etc…) networks. I want to share on the network everyone else is on - that’s FB. I’d argue that it’s way more important to me to share to facebook than to share to newsblur (what is it called? burr blog or something?) because *all of my friends are on facebook*.

#rant on (apologies)
Facebook is the defacto social network. It’s just like back in the day with the word processor wars. MS Word owns word processing (remember wordperfect? I do, loved it, but they lost and no one pays them anymore). If Google can’t crack the power of this network effect even though they have loads of resources, a niche site is not likely to.

Community building sites should be thrilled about this - they don’t (and for heaven’s sake shouldn’t) have to build their communities from scratch. All the marks (us) are in one place and that place has lots of hooks for niche communities to use.

If I were deciding what to work on I’d do it in order:
1 iPhone (I’m an android user but assume you’re getting more traction on iPhone)
2 Android
3 Facebook. You need to have a mobile app/site/plugin working on FB. I’d say this is more important than the web since discoverability is key.
4 Web (yes PC is last - I do 90% of my news reading on a phone. PC reserved for longer-form articles or research).

#rant off (thanks for listening if you made it this far)

2 Likes
#2

Do you mean nonexistent lacking or insufficient lacking? Because emailing stories to a bunch of different sites including Facebook can be configured in Preferences, but I don’t care about Facebook myself so I haven’t tested it to see how it works.

#3

Mostly not working. On the web there’s an f (always off now by default) checkbox but it doesnt work. Doesnt show up in my newsfeed. The android client doesn’t even ask. So I have to open every article and either use the site’s fb link (they all have them) or android’s share via. For someone that reads and shares several thousand articles a year that’s a pain.

the first place I heard about reader’s impending demise was reader itself. The 2nd was facebook. Everyone was talking about it (and wondering where to go, sharing experiences with alts, etc…)