It is hard to tell what will be shared to your Facebook wall these days. If you aren’t careful, you could end up leaving your entire web history on your Facebook page. It’s enough to make someone want to spend all of their non-Facebook browsing time in incognito mode.
Brittany Darwell over at Inside Facebook has spotted a new symbol that may help solve this problem. A small icon that looks like two arrows pointing in a square now appears next to links that will automatically share a story to a user’s wall telling everyone that they clicked the link. This is primarily an issue with social news reader apps that us this automatic sharing spread stories and video like weeds. Facebook’s recent decision to include some of these “trending articles” in user’s timelines has been unpopular, if the comments on our story are anything to go by.
Darwell states that the symbol is green when it will share to a user’s wall, and grey when disabled. The way to disable this “social sharing” option is to manually adjust, as seen in the picture above, who can see posts from social reader apps, setting the option to “only me.” Users must do this for every app they have enabled that will automatically make posts. Darwell also points out that, thought the symbol is small and ambiguous, it is only one of the options Facebook is testing.
What do you think? Has Facebook gotten in over their heads with stories that are automatically shared? Has your Facebook News Feed been flooded with these types of stories lately? Leave a comment below and let me know.
(via Inside Facebook)
