Yahoo Thinks Everything You Read Should Be Shared, That You Should Be Comfortable With It

If you've been a part of Facebook through the most recent round of updates that've included what they've dubbed "Frictionless Sharing", you know that many connected apps are now demanding that everything you experience through them should also be shared with all of your contacts – when asked by TechCrunch whether or not this was ruining users ability to curate what's shown in their day to day, Yahoo's Mike Kerns had some disturbing things to say. The conversation came about amid Yahoo's announcement that Facebook's Frictionless Sharing experience had brought them the auto-sharing of 1 million articles over a 2 month period, this leading to 500,000 daily referrals to their site. In response to this success, Yahoo has released a notifications system across their sites, this showing off content activity in a similar way to Facebook. Kerns basically tells TechCrunch that kids these days like to share, and should just suck it up.

To be fair, his exact words are a bit different than that, but essentially speak the same message. What Yahoo wants to do is to have everyone you know seeing everything you do, not just in the way Facebook and Google+ show activity related to your media, but in a more expansive way like Facebook's Frictionless Sharing — this time on everything. As Kerns tells Josh Constine:

"[These changes will] increase engagement and traffic. If we can scale [the Facebook success of Yahoo! News US] globally, it will have a a big impact on our media inventory. ... The younger demographic is totally comfortable with a persistent state of sharing. People should be comfortable as themselves." – Kerns

Notifications will have users bouncing between Yahoo properties (unless they can stave off the clicking of notifications, of course) and the group hopes it will stopper up the recent losses the group has seen. A net income decrease of 26% in Q3 of 2011 isn't news anyone wants to hear, is it?

[via TechCrunch]