Arthur C. Clarke famously said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
The recent Facebook frictionless sharing gives us a new one “Any sufficiently complete and transparent sharing is just going to be creepy”.
We’re basically a fickle bunch. Some of us want to share more easily, but sharing everything also irritates us. Facebook in particular annoys me because I can’t send my habits for the useful bubbled-up aggregations, without the endless inanity of GARETH IS LISTENING TO BLAH. Given I listen to a lot of the same songs that’s really boring and spam. Ditto what articles I’m reading on The Guardian, individually quite dull but as part of the “things that you & your friends have been reading” aggregated things a bit more interesting.
Anyway, this is kind of problem that services like Zeebox will always face, incomplete or creepy. As a standalone app I have to remember to use it (and I’m already using my iPad for twitter), if they did ever have direct integration with my TV (By this I mean my TV updating things, rather than the existing TV Remote functionality in the app), I’d be creeped out because again, viewing habits reveal some awful taste. Maybe I just need a “share this” button on my remote that can easily publish what I’m doing to Facebook or some other back-end. A bit less friction, but still some.
It’s a tough one to solve, but we can’t seem to be comprehensive and convenient without being creepy.