Right now Facebook is completely dominating us. There’s no good outlet for blog posts that integrates well with FB because they don’t allow linking in their timeline posts.
If you look through Facebook, you won’t find many outbound links, they do all kinds of things to discourage it.
So they’re turning the web into a Facebook thing. Because that’s where we have to post to get engagement. But we can’t use the rest of the web. And that’s the problem.
Facebook’s Subtle Empire
From this perspective, Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has become an immensely powerful media organization in its own right, albeit one that effectively subcontracts actual news gathering to other entities (this newspaper included). And its potential influence is amplified by the fact that this Cronkite-esque role is concealed by Facebook’s self-definition as “just” a social hub.
.. Beck is right that Facebook is different in kind from any news organization before it, and that traditional critiques of media bias — from the Chomskyite left as well as from the right — don’t apply neatly to what it’s doing.
Facebook Is Making a Map of Everyone in the World
And they’re using a brand new A.I. technique and a whole lot of computing power to do it.
Facebook developers taught their neural-net algorithms to recognize what a building looked like from above in this data. Then, they turned the programs loose. The software estimated urban density by the number of buildings it could see, and extrapolated the best-available population data onto the settlements.
.. These photos will be cheaper than ever before, and they’ll be more recent: Thanks to cheaper rockets and advances in small satellite-building, some companies are promising “revisit rates” of six or seven times per week.
.. This new data won’t be valuable unless companies—especially financial companies—get good at deciphering it without human labor. Already, startups like Skybox (owned by Alphabet) and Descartes Labs say they’ve made advances in pulling information out of pictures without a person sitting at the table.
The Face of Facebook
Zuckerberg may seem like an over-sharer in the age of over-sharing. But that’s kind of the point. Zuckerberg’s business model depends on our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display. The more that people are willing to put online, the more money his site can make from advertisers. Happily for him, and the prospects of his eventual fortune, his business interests align perfectly with his personal philosophy. In the bio section of his page, Zuckerberg writes simply, “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.”
.. Despite his goal of global openness, however, Zuckerberg remains a wary and private person. He doesn’t like to speak to the press, and he does so rarely. He also doesn’t seem to enjoy the public appearances that are increasingly requested of him. Backstage at an event at the Computer History Museum, in Silicon Valley, this summer, one of his interlocutors turned to Zuckerberg, minutes before they were to appear onstage, and said, “You don’t like doing these kinds of events very much, do you?” Zuckerberg replied with a terse “No,” then took a sip from his water bottle and looked off into the distance.
.. When he was about eleven, his parents hired a computer tutor, a software developer named David Newman, who came to the house once a week to work with Mark. “He was a prodigy,” Newman told me. “Sometimes it was tough to stay ahead of him.” (Newman lost track of Zuckerberg and was stunned when he learned during our interview that his former pupil had built Facebook.) Soon thereafter, Mark started taking a graduate computer course every Thursday night at nearby Mercy College. When his father dropped him off at the first class, the instructor looked at Edward and said, pointing to Mark, “You can’t bring him to the classroom with you.” Edward told the instructor that his son was the student.