Re:Google wants websites to adopt AMP as the default for bui...
by JoshMnem on Thursday September 06, 2018 @11:44AM
(#17927073)
> it doesn't show that any of your friends are on there yet.
That wouldn't work in practice. People shouldn't have to share the list of websites they visit with third party entities, and some of us don't use social media. Some people's social media "friends" lists are full of people who they don't know. The future of marketing and phishing would be for bots to befriend unsuspecting people in order to build trust for their sites.
Let me explain, if you enter facébook.com then on the url bar it will not show that your friends are on this site as well. The exact gui is irrelevant, the point is that it will be easy to tell whether you are on the right website that you are used to navigating to based on the indicator of amounts of friends and who is using and recommending that site. This will also cultivate a certain awareness that if you are navigating outside your usual url space then you will probably be more careful because it doesn't show that any of your friends are on there yet. Banks might offer a service where their bot "befriends" you on socialnetwork XYZ to get that nice little indicator that you are on the right banking website without anybody else actually having to use it. This system might work for any website actually. If there is a concern that this disincentivizes people from using new websites then I think it will be outweighed by several factors like your desire to establish social proof - meaning that you might be more likely to share the new website you found so you can be safer when visiting it next time because you only have to look at the url indicator and see that friend X that you recommended it to has also added this website to their profile.