Prices rise Tuesday:

Join us Dec. 1-3 in Nashville for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit

SAVE NOW

Frictionless Sharing Isn’t Without a Cost

The Feed is Digiday’s Web-culture corner. Check The Feed everyday for Web-culture news roundups, infographics, essays and more. Follow us on Twitter for updates throughout the day @digiday.

Frictionless Isn’t Fun: Facebook’s Open Graph is proving to be pretty annoying for everyone. You have probably seen your news feed full of posts about friends reading articles on Yahoo or The Guardian, which is a feature of frictionless sharing; however, the annoying part is that if you click on these shared articles, you will be prompted to add the news site’s social sharing app. As CNET’s Molly Wood points out, “In search of ‘frictionless’ sharing, Facebook is putting up a barrier to entry on items your friends want you to see — that is, they’re creating friction. Even if it’s just a onetime inconvenience, any barrier to sharing breaks sharing.” More than just causing friction, Wood also notes that if everyone does just embrace the Open Graph, then pretty soon all of our Facebook feeds will be entirely taken over by passive, automated, seamlessly shared posts. That doesn’t seem very social for a social network. CNET

Texting Crackdown in Pakistan: Pakistan’s Telecommunications Authority is cracking down on texting. The PTA has come up with a list of around 1,700 words that it considers offensive and has ordered that phone companies start filtering these words from text messages. While many words on the list are profanities and other gross things you would expect, but then there are some like “Athlete’s Foot,” “Glazed Donut” and “Penthouse” that don’t make quite as much sense. The PTA claims that this measure is meant to cut down on spamming. So much for freedom of speech and privacy. Hindustan Times

Kohl’s Pulls a Rebecca Black: Smart marketing or annoying hijacking of an annoying viral sensation? A little bit of both. Kohl’s has created a commercial using a spoof of Rebecca Black’s god-awful song “Friday” to promote its Black Friday sale. Watch for yourself. It’s equally if not more annoying than the original. The Daily Dot

Tumblr of the Day: Literary quotes depicted by TV stills, or as the Tumblr creator describes it, “Kurt Vonnegut, meet Brenda Walsh.” Slaughterhouse 90210

Video of the Day: I don’t like cats, but if it will give me free massages, I’ll take one! That’s one lucky son of a bitch, literally. The Daily What

More in Media

Reach CEO touts Google AI deal as a template, steps up pressure on OpenAI over scraping 

Digiday spoke with Reach CEO Piers North about his plans to make its Google AI content deal a blueprint framework for other LLM deals, and its recent cease-and-desist letter to OpenAI.

Social commerce edges past SEO at The Independent for the first time

The Independent’s social-commerce revenue edged past its SEO-based commerce revenue for the first time in September, CEO Christian Broughton said at Digiday’s Media Strategies event in London this week. 

Ownership, control, margins: the brand playbook for microseries is still taking shape

Creator-led microseries are hot, and brands want in, but everyone’s still figuring out the structure of the deals and the content itself