I hate it when I log onto Facebook to find my news feed cluttered with worthless, spammy posts about which song a friend is listening to or the images she pinned to Pinterest. Turns out, I'm not the only one.
Facebook announced today that it is disabling third-party apps from automatically posting to your Facebook news feed. This means there will be no more auto-posts from RunKeeper about your friend running 3.1 miles this morning. Same goes for your annoying cousin who auto-posts anything at all via the Famville app. The idea is to clean up our news feeds from spam and other unwanted information.
From now on, the only posts like these you will see are the ones your friends explicitly share from apps.
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"In general, we've found that people engage more with stories that are shared explicitly rather than implicitly, and often feel surprised or confused by stories that are shared implicitly or automatically," Facebook said in a blog post. "Over the past year, the number of implicitly shared stories in news feed has naturally declined. This decline is correlated with how often people mark app posts as spam, which dropped by 75 percent over the same period."
Last week, Facebook made a similar update to Instagram. In the app's updated version, an image posted to Instagram will not be automatically posted to Facebook. Those images will only appear on Facebook if the person posting the image deliberately chooses to share it on Facebook.
I say hallelujah to that.
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