Can I get facebook unique share count?

What design of the Facebook News Feed would get users to share the maximum amount, addressing concerns users have about over-sharing to friends or people who don't want to see the content?

• Some users share more on specific websites integrating Facebook but choose not to publish to Facebook to avoid sharing too much.  Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare and Quora are examples of this.  How can a feed be designed to make users comfortable with sharing as much as possible?  Is there a way to solve for users simply not wanting to share to all their friends?  Already the feed is designed to show content to each user based on what they would probably want to see, so in concept people should feel more comfortable with sharing knowing that what they share will go to people who are likely to want to see it. This is a follow-up question to .

• Answer:

  People increasingly do what they get (positive) feedback from: “Likes”, by lowering the threshold to that feedback, both increased the number of (welcomed) interactions and encouraged more users to interact with updates, leasing to more comments. That's why I'm not sure “addressing concerns users have about over-sharing” would help to share more—just like repeating speed limits and having commemoration of accidents along the road could encourage safer driving but might not increase car transit. Users have a hard time making sense of a far more important aspect: not over-sharing juicy gossip (something desperately rare, actually but that scare users because they don't know who see what and is focal when deciding to participate) but truckloads of out-of-context irrelevant garbage (over-present & overlooked). Addressing that scare is most likely the most obvious way to encourage sharing, but it might compromise stalking, the engine of such site. “Stalking” is use by lack of a better word: it's socially similar to what happens in a cocktail party, when people listen to those who boast loudly, and don't care to be over-heard; they still try to adapt what they say and engage with those who appear to be listening. A website very similar to Facebook implemented that feedback in 2005 (http://friendset.fr) and it was a catastrophe: visiting a webpage became like “poking” (What does it mean? Is (s)he hot?) and collapse when it became clear you couldn't visit other pages without offending most profiles you visited. All similar experiments when the same way before being immediately suspended. I believe that application that promise  to do the same thing are the #1 threat to Facebook and treated as such. It makes sense on LinkedIn, ie. in a professional context, where being poached by a head-hunter isn't socially damaging (like being pulled on would be for someone in a relationship) and only paying users (ie. headhunters almost exclusively). However, I believe Facebook can experiment to find a way to show updaters who will see what you post in their NewsFeed, and separating it clearly from those who could find it, if they looked for it (to avoid showing an empty profile to a nosy and easily offended friend) but who wouldn't be bother a priori. That information has to be associated to a form of publication control (yet more UX challenges) that could reintroduce groups or similar associations. This format only shows Facebook decisions, and might be an acceptable form of back-stalking because it avoids all direct user's decisions: “This users has shown, in the past, interest to stories that an algorithm thinks is similar to this one.” would be like Amazon's suggestion, more funny at times than offensive. It could trigger drama (“You saw that! Why didn't you liked it?!”) but those concerns could be low level enough to encourage consideration for other people's interests rather than bitch about it. Once again: not a very teenager-proof system. As I pointed out, the issue with such a system is that it would make every update dramatic, and probably will lower all the phatic updates (the frequent empty messages that are necessary to civilized relations). I think Facebook wants those, and to preserve, they'd better make the controls optional… witch they already have, with a well-advertizing but rather cumbersome, serious, photo-free interface that no one uses. You reach it by clicking on a light grey lock next to the bright blue Update button. Maybe Facebook needs to auto-detect more revealing updates based on text content, and darken the lock accordingly, or make it bigger, with clarification text, etc. Subtle suggestion like those a probable the best way to preserve the generally candid tone and nudge say a gay user closeted to his colleagues, just before he posts that rather candid update about “wonderful boys” last night, that he could use a little filtering. A public competition about great updates, “Like” ranking, similar to what ends up in the twitter feed of FavStar100, might encourage a different use of Facebook and more attempts to be witty, but I doubt users will be comfortable with the mixed message about public quotes and private conversations. Facebook can however, detect what users commonly use the site as a ranting ground, or an expert website (like I do: I'd be happy if anyone could read 80% of my updates but it's just too technical outside of my Friend circle, not unlike my twitter feed) and try to work on the frontier of such user clusters to diversify message, and let people post more because they post about both areas of public interest (aka, they rant about ComCast) and personal issues (bad day). TL;DR: Showing who can or cannot see every feed might have the opposite impact of scaring people away. Showing all users would be a design and readability issue, so either Facebook uses representative agents (like the six they not-so randomly put below profile pictures) and infers from the users' modification of this sample what should be changed in the visibility setting of every update, or they explicitly make groups easy to handle through that “who can see that?” pane. Most users' understanding of a situation would be more compatible with the first option, although not being able to control everything in detail would be frustrating, but that frustration would be great to encourage group-filtering in the longer term.