FB app for WP.com automatically post 'Like' to Timeline
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Currently, when a visitor to a WordPress.com post presses the (Facebook) “Like” button, the ‘WordPress.com’ Facebook application takes the liberty of automatically posting a story about this “Like” to that visitors personal Timeline. In my opinion, this should be changed.
If I choose to publicly “Like” a certain blog post, then I obviously should have no objections to this event being broadcast to the Newsfeeds of my Facebook friends. However, it should *not* be automatically assumed that I also wish to “Share” this WordPress.com blog post on my own Timeline!
I know that the settings for this app already allow me to specify “Who can see posts this app makes for you on your Facebook timeline?”, where I can choose “Only me” or “Custom”. In my opinion, it would be most appropriate if there were also an additional setting for controlling whether or not these automatic posts are made at all. This could be with a simple checkbox, or maybe with a menu that offers choices of “Yes / No / Ask Me”.
This should be in the best interest of WordPress.com, who I assume benefit whenever people “Like” posts on WordPress.com . The current behavior might cause certain (many?) people to simply avoid pressing the “Like” button on such posts. Not everyone has the patience to explicitly hide the undesired auto-posts from their own Timeline.
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To my knowledge, the responsibility for who shows the Like on your Timeline is Facebook’s (and yours because, as you say above, you have the choice to turn that off), not WordPress’s.
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Actually, the responsibility most certainly lays with the creator of the ‘WordPress.com’ FB app. And the FB page for this app explicitly lists ‘WordPress.com’ as its creator.
Yes, one can go to the apps’s settings and set its privacy settings to “Only Me.” However, this is *not* the default setting. And many FB users are probably not savvy enough to know how to play with these settings.
Moreover, setting it to to “Don’t auto-post” or “Only Me” in a blanket fashion is not flexible enough. Indeed, I might occasionally *want* to have this posted to my Timeline, and WordPress.com should encourage — but not force — me to post to my Timeline as often as possible. That is why I think having a default setting of “Ask Me” would be in the best interest of all.
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