WSJ becomes a bit too friendly with SeenThis
Posted on June 4, 2008 by Chris
I was reading the Wall Street Journal this morning like I usually do and I noticed an advertisement for the Facebook application SeenThis. What SeenThis does it it correlates what you are reading on the web with what the members on your friends list are reading on the web and shows you what is mutually popular.
I guess the concept with this application is that articles that your friends are interested in would somehow be interesting to you. I have a hard time with this concept as it presupposes that a friends list is composed of people with similar tastes and I know from my own Facebook list that this is definitely not the case. There is just too much difference between the motley collection of characters who connected to me to be of any value in surfacing content I might find interesting.
Now right above the SeenThis widget on the page was another widget from PeopleReady that constructs a correlation between the article you are reading and other articles that people who read this article also looked at.
To me, this approach is a lot more relevant and produces some value to the reader as it attempts to connect like content based on a wide number of readers. That approach makes sense to me and I just don’t see the value of a widget like SeenThis.
I’ll keep looking for a Facebook application that has even a minor impact on my online life. So far I haven’t found one.
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