Forgetting what’s important to the user

Found a great read today regarding Twitter and how the amount of followers does not translate into a similar influence. Implementing Social media support into apps is a requirement for most projects I do these days and it’s seen by PMs as one of the most important things to include. Several times lately, I’ve had developer friends tell me how their PMs want sharing implemented over way more important features. Yesterday I was reminded by a good example.

My wife showed me a nifty little iPhone recipe app published by the Norwegian council for fruit and vegetables. This app has the all important support for Facebook and Twitter, but isn’t it way more important to be able to tag a recipe as interesting so you can look it up while at the store? Adding support for saving favorites would be much more valuable to me than telling my friends what I might have for dinner. In the case of my wife - she uses Facebook and she has her second iPhone. However she dislikes pointless updates like “vacuuming my living room” and “having cucumbers for dinner”. Why do PMs think that boring your friends is more important than actually using the app they spent so much money developing?

Is it always worth adding Twitter and Facebook links to everything in place of other features? How about users that don’t use Twitter and Facebook?