Post By: David Subar, CTO
Perhaps you’d heard of Spotify before references to it started showing up in your Facebook feed. That would likely put you in the minority. However, there’s a good possibility that you’ve seen what your friends are listening to via notifications from the online music service appearing in your Facebook feed. Welcome to the power of Facebook’s Open Graph.
While we have integrated our own Spotify-like Open Graph capability, our technical team has gone to great lengths to ensure that we’re done so in a user-friendly manner. In short, we’re not looking to take over users’ feeds and turn them into our own private distribution channel on Facebook. Rather, we started by considering what users want and working from there—even when it resulted in us nixing our first iteration of Open Graph.
We want to provide videos that our fans want to watch, and we want to enable them to be ahead of the curve on discovering content and sharing it with their friends however and whenever they want. Should they choose to share on Facebook, we have made it incredibly easy for them to do so, but we’ve made it equivalently easy for them to opt out. Furthermore, should they rethink sharing a certain video, they can unshare it after the fact.
In total, we put our entire Open Graph integration together with our users squarely in mind. We wanted to give them the ability to control what they share and who they share with as well as give them the ability to unshared at their discretion. We want to make the seamlessly integrate content discovery and sharing, and Facebook is a natural place to start.
