Up until Facebook introduced frictionless sharing, users by default had more control over their own version of the social Web. Sharing content to Facebook meant clicking the "Like" button, cutting and pasting a link into the status update box, "checking in" on Facebook or Foursquare and clicking the re-tweet button n Twitter. Frictionless sharing is here to stay. It's up to the user to turn it on or shut it off.

Frictionless Sharing: Music

Spotify rolled out deep integration with Facebook shortly after f8, requiring a Facebook account in order to sign up. Usage shot way up, but that's not to say all are in favor of its frictionless sharing techniques.

In exchange for free music from Spotify, Facebook streams music tracks onto one's profile for their network to see. Spotify calls this the "soundtrack of your social life" - and it's all right there on the Facebook profile. Spotify is also centered around social discovery, hoping to increase music recommendations among friends. As with any free service on the Internet, users pay with their data though ultimately Spotify hopes to turn its free users into paying customers. Like Spotify, music streaming services competitors MOG and Rdio also dropped their fees.

Not everyone wants to tell their social graph about what they're listening to. In fact, our own music writer John Paul Titlow turned off his Spotify integration.

Spotify does add an interesting new social layer to the online music listening experience. And it opens you up to your friends' entire library of music. Through frictionless sharing, you might discover that you have the same taste in music as someone else you know - or you might find new tunes based on the social graph rather than through a music recommendation service like Pandora. In fact, this happened to me. I discovered that a friend was also listening to Katy Perry (because really, who in the world isn't listening to Katy Perry?) and we, like, totally and instantly bonded over that! For a moment on Facebook, anyway.

While these types of happenstance discoveries could bring about new interests and connection, the majority of Spotify streaming just feels like noise that's popping up in the news ticker. Facebook has not proven itself to be a one-stop shop for music like Pandora. But that's not what it wants to be, really.

The good news is that you can adjust the privacy settings for frictionless sharing apps like Spotify. If you really wanted to, you could just change to "Custom" so that only you would see what you post from the app.

On the actual data collecting side, does Facebook really need this much information about anyone's music listening habits? If Timeline is a curated version of your life, then the answer is yes. But not everyone is as interested in lifestreaming as Facebook seems to believe.

Next page: Frictionless sharing for news, and how this trend will play out in the coming year.