Open Graph
Description
Mat Honan:
"Open Graph is a development tool that lets third-party apps and sites report your activities back to Facebook. It's meant to extend or replace the Like button. It's a way for sites and services to jack directly into Facebook from anywhere. If companies use Open Graph, they can publish to your Ticker and Timeline, too, effectively sending tattle-tale updates on anything you do to everyone you know, in real time. And then Facebook gets to keep that data forever. It is the ultimate collection tool, a way for Facebook to monitor you, wherever you go.
The thing about Open Graph is that it's actually very seductive. Now, when I listen to a new song on Spotify (or Rdio, or MOG, for that matter) it shows up on Facebook's Ticker immediately, as it happens. My friends can play it, right then and there. They can also see trends about my listening habits in my feed. And, damn, that's actually kind of cool. It delivers on this cool premise of true real time sharing. In return it only asks for what Facebook has always asked for: our privacy." (http://gizmodo.com/5844044/unlike-why-facebook-integration-is-actually-antisocial)
Example
Mat Honan:
"When Facebook announced all this at its F8 developers' conference last week, Spotify took center stage. Its demo was a hit, and people applauded! Yay, Spotify!
But the Spotify we knew last week is a fundamentally different business from the one that exists this week for one simple reason: If you want to join Spotify now, you have sign up with your Facebook account. In simple terms, Spotify isn't asking for access to your data anymore. It's demanding it. No Facebook account; no Spotify. In essence, Facebook-sharing is no longer a feature for new users, it's a requirement. It must know that for a company that traffics in what is new and popular and hip, it is taking a decidedly unpopular action. Spotify sold its cool.
Spotify says it's made the move to promote better music discovery. That's lame and untrue. Sure, you can help people to discover new music by forcing them to promote your app on Facebook. You can also do it by listening to a jambox turned up to full volume on a crowded bus. Both of those are pretty shitty ways of doing things. Both are forced exposure.
Spotify isn't the first to offload the account process to Facebook. Hell, it's not even the first music service to require a Facebook account. Turntable.fm (another F8 presenter) has required Facebook to login from its earliest inception. And obviously there are enough Facebook-only apps to keep you Zynga-ing for the rest of your miserable life.
But seeing a service as huge and hyped as Spotify—especially one that's in a footrace with competing start-ups like Rdio and established players like Apple for users—go Facebook-only is troubling. Spotify is going all-in with Facebook. It will not gain a single new user from now on who isn't a Facebook user. Not one. It's shutting the door on billions of people to rapidly gain millions. Yet, surely it's done the math, and thinks that price is worth it. So far, it certainly seems to be paying off. And sadly it probably indicates that a Facebook-required policy will only proliferate.
To be clear, Spotify isn't the big problem. It's just the spear tip. Having an app rat you out for listening to some shitty song is embarrassing. But it gets much worse when you start extending Open Graph everywhere and it begins tattling on far more personal details like, say, your reading habits." (http://gizmodo.com/5844044/unlike-why-facebook-integration-is-actually-antisocial)