Online music streaming website Dhingana has launched an open graph app on Facebook with integration to Facebook’s new Timeline. This app will allow users to share the music they are currently listening to with their Facebook friends in realtime, quite similar to Gaana.com* and Saavn’s open graph apps that launched in February 2012.
To use the app, users have to login to Dhingana with their Facebook account credentials and grant access to their timeline. Following this, whenever a user listens to a song, Dhingana will share the user’s activity on their Facebook timeline indicating the song he is listening to, and allow his friends to play music right from the Facebook Timeline. Besides this, users will also be able to create and share playlists with their friends and get personalized song recommendations.
NDTV Social Reader
Also launching an Open Graph app on Facebook is broadcaster NDTV, which has released a social news reader with integration to Facebook’s Timeline feature, allowing readers to share NDTV content (text, photos and videos) on their timelines. To use the app, users can head over to NDTV.com to login with their Facebook account credentials and grant access to their timeline.
Poor Execution: As we’ve said earlier, we are quite skeptical whether social news readers should have a real time sharing mechanism since the app shares every random story that we click onto our timeline, thereby marking it as a recommendation to friends, irrespective of whether we think the story is worth sharing or not. However, NDTV seems has gone a step further for the worse, featuring NDTV’s social reader app as a popup whenever the user lands on a NDTV article (We encountered this when we clicked on an NDTV article from Google). Although it must be noted that we didn’t get this popup on all the NDTV articles.
We don’t understand why companies who offer social reader apps, don’t provide a better sharing mechanism where the user has complete control over the content he is sharing, rather than these “frictionless” social reading app which auto-sharing every article the user clicks in order to leverage on the social network’s virality, since these apps kills the Facebook user experience by spamming user’s Facebook feed with articles. Facebook itself had suggested a similar practice last year, encouraging companies to develop controls within the app that enable better sharing.
Facebook changing modules or Social reading apps losing popularity? : It’s no wonder that Facebook is reportedly working on a trending articles section to find out the most engaging way to show news articles from these social reader apps. Interestingly, earlier this week, it was reported that Facebook social reader usage is taking a nosedive, with Washington Post’s Social Reader losing nearly 10 million users in the last month and The Guardian’s app now registering one-sixth of the user base it had a month ago, although Washington Post’s engament producer had later attributed it to evolving Facebook modules. It noted that the social network was previously showing 4-5 stories in a list with prominent placement in Facebook’s news feed. Through the new trending articles section, Facebook shows only one article at a time and is often buried down in the Facebook’s news feed.
* Disclosure: Indiatimes which operates Gaana.com is an advertiser with MediaNama
