This morning we talked about the kinds of sharing that are natural to Facebook: music, movies and books topped our list. When you see a good movie, listen to music, or read a great book, you naturally want to pull your friends in to share your experience.
Today at f8, Mark Zuckerberg echoed this observation, adding TV to the list. He went on to outline his aim to extend sharing beyond the already big categories of communication and games, into the naturals of music, movies, TV and books. Features including timelines, addition of verbs to the omnipresent “Like” button (I “Read” Beyond Religion by the Dalai Lama), and the ticker all greatly enhance our ability to share what we watch, listen to, and read with friends. This is great confirmation for authors and publishers that Facebook’s population of 800 million people is the right place to be, and that applications will continue to be highly successful in connecting authors with readers on Facebook. As GigaOm editor Kevin Tofel tweeted, “By cramming more media activities in Facebook, engagement will go way up. You won’t be in the browser all day, you’ll be in FB all day.”
The key word Mark used is “Discovery.” In his talk, Mark walks through the process of discovering music through your friends, and how this makes possible an unprecedented level of finding and buying music you’d never have found on your own. The same opportunity for social discovery and buying holds true for books. Where bookstores have long been the place for browsing and finding what’s new, applications in Facebook can now provide the digital equivalent through social sharing.
Now for the top three:
1) Natural sharing. Focus is extending out from basic communications and games to naturally shared experiences like music, movies, TV and books.
2) New features. Sharing of media experiences among friends is getting easier with the Ticker, Timelines, and the addition of verbs beyond Like.
3) Social discovery. Facebook is increasing the ability for people to find what they could never find before, through ever-expanding networks of friends.
All of this is great news for digital discovery and buying of new books, found through natural sharing within Facebook’s far-reaching social graph.
