Facebook Integration: It’s the Fad You Can’t Skip

By Sanya Weathers

I got online this morning, and I was greeted with the information that a former coworker, an ex-boyfriend, and one of my best friends from high school all thought a particular link was important enough to share. I had not yet had any caffeine, and I blinked in confusion. Had I messed up my usual ritual, and gone to Facebook before checking the headlines?

No. My local paper (the Washington Post) just implemented their Facebook integration toolset.

Facebook been called a time suck, shallow, and trivial – and that’s before we get into the myriad legitimate privacy concerns. Plenty of people are predicting the end of Facebook, pointing at the rise and fall of older networking applications as evidence. It’s a fad, it’s silly, it’s teaching an entire generation new ways to be embarrassed on Monday morning. And you can’t afford to skip it.

No matter what the problems are, there are still 500 million people (mostly college educated or college bound, with the resulting higher level of disposable income) on Facebook. The most active users have big social networks with whom they love to share videos and links. Sharing stuff on Facebook is both a thrill for the people who love to be the first to discover a new thing, and fun for the social animals who get a kick out of being part of a larger community.

And Facebook keeps going further and further with its plug and play tools to make it even easier to for users to share your content with their networks with a single click.

A simple “share this on Facebook” button is the closest thing to free advertising there is.