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According to a Leaked App, Facebook Wants Your Sharing to Go Deeper

Codenamed "Moments," the in-development app would foster micro-sharing among close family and friends.
Image: sharpshutter/Shutterstock

Last week, TechCrunch leaked a few details about a (possibly) forthcoming Facebook app codenamed "Moments." The basic aim is "micro-sharing," a system in which users hand-pick between various pools of contacts to determine the reach of a given post. Remember Google Plus' Circles? It appears to be a lot like that. It's also a lot like what Facebook users can do already via privacy settings and targeting, but perhaps more intuitive.

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The problem, it seems, is that people just don't use Facebook's existing privacy controls. It's easy to build and target to subnetworks with the existing service, but not easy enough.

TC reports:

Our source who's seen Moments likened it to the mobile app Cluster, which lets people create safe "spaces" for sharing content with small groups of people like family, best friends, high school buddies, or co-workers. Moments will similarly let people share to different subsets of their total friend list using a more visual design. This should be more comfortable for people than the tiny text-based privacy selector on their News Feed composer which relies on little-used Friend Lists.

It's less clear who this might be targeted to. People like me that don't feel all that great about posting super-personal stuff on the internet? Facebook users that are already oversharing? It doesn't seem likely to attract either group really. Oversharers will continue to overshare via their current channels and privacy worriers will continue to worry. If oversharers can't be bothered to use the existing privacy controls built into Facebook, why would anyone expect that they'd jump to a whole new app?

What's more, members of the two categories above tend to associate mostly with other members of the same category, right? As a privacy worrier, you likely connect with more worriers than oversharers, and the other way around. Or perhaps I'm just underestimating the middle-ground between the two: a vast population of social media users just itching to let loose with the personal dirt, but need a slick, intuitive interface to do so rather than the more rickety-feeling controls of Facebook proper.