I like many others watched bits of the F8 keynote the other day. Just as with the unveiling of the Like button over a year ago I watched and I worried a little.

To me the Like button is a human powered web crawler. Most crawlers index the known web. When pressed, the Like button indexes the declaratively important web. Some may say that it indexes the visited web because the Like button is an IFRAME and even if logged out some of the data in Facebook’s cookies are available for tracking purposes. At best it has a shaped graph of how often a page is visited, something which could be used for filtering or ranking search. At worst from a privacy perspective it has propensities of liking, both for the content and for the user.

The new move into bringing media into apps and a walled garden takes this a stage further. Leaving aside whether walled gardens are a smart or dim move for now there’s one bit of user interaction/integration I’ve never seen before which is real time scrobbling of text content. Last.fm’s scrobbler at least waits until you’re part the way through a track before recording your play of it. This gives you time to discard it, to try new bits of music on privately before declaring your interest in them. 

Text is harder. Sure you could see if people scroll down the page as a measure of engagement. Simply at the moment they click it to say they’ve read it implies a meaning that isn’t there. Everything in the graph is based on verbs. To me the right verb is “opened” or “clicked”, maybe “viewed”; “reading” is a very different action more purposeful, more intentional, more emotional.

I think it’ll shape user behaviour and engagement with content more than it will alter people’s knowledge of how to change privacy settings. You may see something which you don’t necessarily agree with or know would be uncomfortable for your friends, and rather than go amend privacy settings to see it privately you’ll just not look at it.

All this real time scrobbling content will do, in my opinion, is to channel some people further into apparently safe monocultures and reduce the impact of content which could diversify their views. Or they’ll hopefully just walk out of the gates of the walled garden and read it elsewhere. It’s the beginning of the end for one or other thing. Time will tell.