Facebook has enhanced its sharing options for website publishers in two ways; the Share button, and the FB.Connect feed form. While the feed form was released a few weeks back, it’s the former update to Facebook’s sharing options that is of particular interest to me because of the way in which it rests the majority of the perceived privacy control in the hands of the end user.
With the new dialog, Facebook users can post the link to their profile (wall), or send it directly to a few friends or a single friend, select the image they would like to attach, and include a comment as well. Users could already share web content on their Facebook wall by manually posting the link or by adding their own browser bookmarklet, which gave you the option of adding the web content to your wall or sending it to a single friend. But the new Share button is designed for third parties to better promote sharing capabilities to Facebook profiles without the necessary use of full Facebook Connect integration and giving more options to web publishers for encouraging sharing capabilities on their sites.

The new Share button has the same privacy options as the Facebook bookmarklet, which is important as Facebook needs to retain user’s ability to maintain full control of their sharing settings. As Facebook both competes with Twitter for more open content sharing within and across sites and seeks to give users more privacy settings in an easy-to-use format, Facebook’s new Share button must achieve these multiple goals.
The overall changes may seem slight, but I think it’s another step in the right direction for Facebook. The news feed is central to many of Facebook’s long term goals with its network, and providing even more options to both site publishers and end users is another way in which Facebook is looking to add and generate value from its news feeds.
Likewise, site publishers that add this new Share button to their website will garner some interesting user behavior data that could tie into a few other initives that may or may not relate back to Facebook. As Facebook Pages also become more open to content sharing they become better tools for businesses to use. We’re seeing a lot of development for Pages to become more able to integrate news feeds with third party sites and content, in an automatic and user-facing sense.
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