[evincarofautumn]

The “Social Reader” applications are the worst. All I end up doing is Googling the article title.

Luckily, I don’t think Yahoo! and the Washington Post care an awful lot about the sort of people who log into Facebook at most once a week, and then mainly to use chat.

[CompiledCode]

Agreed. Ads are ubiquitous (I just tune them out), but clicking a link and being told "you can't read this unless you give us your personal info and let us tell all of your friends that you read this" is wrong on so many levels.

I think this sort of thing will add to the downfall of facebook. Non-savvy internet users love facebook, but it only takes one learning experience (such as seeing broadcast that you read a highly-embarrassing article) for people to become wary.

[jquery]

Social readers are worse than you think. Once you've opted in, even reading a Yahoo! article via a Google search may show up in your news feed. My boss potentially seeing me reading articles about "How to ask for a raise" being the epitome of this. Don't know if he saw or not, but it was a educational experience nonetheless. I was trying to be careful and I still got burned.

[CompiledCode]

Ugh. I wouldn't have thought that. And to think ten years ago people were worried about cookies... The bar for privacy on the internet has gotten pretty low.

A friend of mine publicly read "How to improve your sex drive". She's in a relationship....

[theorique]

The “Social Reader” applications are the worst. All I end up doing is Googling the article title.

Amen to that. This is a pox on what should otherwise be a normal hyperlink.