People may have mixed opinions about Facebook's auto-sharing, but Yahoo couldn't love it more. It's easy to understand why, Yahoo boasts that 12 of the top 40 most shared stories of 2011 on Facebook originated from its sites.
And it has paid off for Yahoo, its Yahoo News traffic coming from Facebook has increased three times since introducing the News activity features, just three months ago.
That's even more interesting when considering that only 12 million people have opted into automatically sharing what they read in Yahoo News. That's no insignificant number, but it's only a small portion of Yahoo News' audience.
"More than 12 million of you have given it a try so far, discovering news stories and sharing what you are reading on Yahoo! with all your Facebook friends,"
writes Yahoo.
"Many of you who love to share your reading activity are young and socially-engaged (no surprise!), and this has quickly impacted the virality of Yahoo!’s content on Facebook," it said.
Therefore, Yahoo has decided to expand the feature to several more sites worldwide, after making it available in several US sites recently. In total, 26 international sites will be able to benefit from the automatic sharing feature.
"We’ve recently added it to US-based entertainment experiences, omg!, Yahoo! TV, Yahoo! Movies, and Yahoo! Games as well. The features are designed to bring a deeply personalized, social news experience to more of the content millions of people come to Yahoo! to read each day," Yahoo explained.
Plenty of people were upset, as they always are, at Facebook's new attempt at pushing the privacy and transparency limits. Some worried about the privacy implications, others about the devaluation of online sharing.
At the same time, it seems that, at least some people quickly got comfortable, or at least were not bothered enough to stop using the feature.
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