Apps connect people through sharing in newest social media trend

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The moment Rebecca Jacobs listens to a song on her computer, all of her Facebook friends know.

The chemical engineering freshman uses a free application called Spotify, which links to its users’ Facebook profiles and enables their friends to see what they are listening to.

Last week, Facebook announced its partnership with 60 additional applications similar to Spotify. These applications, which also are known as social gestures, allow people to keep tabs on their cyber friends with instant updates about their activity, providing details about what users are reading, eating, shopping for and watching on TV.

Social gestures such as Washington Post Social Reader and Yahoo! News are a growing trend, professor of communication William Donohue said.

“More and more of these kinds of applications are emerging because they’re just so popular,” Donohue said. “People like to get into everybody else’s business and see what other people are doing.”

Donohue said these applications simply are an extension of what Facebook already is: a means for its users to share information about themselves.

“You can think of Facebook as the tip of the iceberg of the kinds of things people share,” he said. “Rather than just a small network, you have all these electronic media that expose these different elements of people’s lives and then throws them all out there.”

Like many of its users, Jacobs said she uses Facebook to connect easily with her friends, family and other acquaintances.

Jacobs said she finds the website useful for keeping up-to-date with her classes and homework assignments by communicating online with her classmates but especially enjoys using it to maintain contact with people she is not able to see often.

“I do kind of like it for the social experience — seeing what your friends are doing and what’s new with everyone,” she said.

Donohue compares the use of these new applications to the social networks that used to be created when housewives would gather at each other’s homes and share the latest news and gossip. The main difference is this form of communication is much less personal, he said.

“Essentially, it’s kind of back to the future,” Donohue said. “It’s creating these social networks where people don’t get together.”

After discovering the advantages of Spotify compared to Pandora Radio, which is an automatic music recommendation service that does not provide its users the option to link to their Facebook profiles, Jacobs said she created a Spotify account and stopped using Pandora Radio.

“One of the nice things about (Spotify) is that if my friends make a playlist and I like their taste in music, it’s really easy for me to just click on it and listen to what they have going,” she said.

But not all Facebook users are excited about the idea of allowing everyone to see even more of their personal information.

Although he said he can see why students are attracted to services that provide them automatic updates regarding their Facebook friends, Donohue said he was intrigued by the aspects of people’s lives they are interested in.

“I’m always surprised at what people like to know about other people,” he said. “Why would anyone care about what I’m listening to?”

French senior Alicia Johnson said she keeps her profile set to private and does not publish very much information on it.

“I do it so people don’t stalk me or for future employers,” she said. “I don’t want anything to look bad.”

Johnson said she knows of people who use applications such as Spotify and Washington Post Social Reader but does not use either of them herself because she does not like the idea of her Facebook friends having constant updates about her life.

“Not that music is personal, but that’s kind of creepy, the moment-by-moment aspect of it,” she said.

Even though not everyone is on board with Facebook’s changes, Donohue said he is excited to see what other applications develop in the future.

“I think it’s a fascinating idea, and you can just imagine all the different ways you can link stuff to Facebook,” he said.

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