Facebook Only Cares About Facebook

Whatever Mark Zuckerberg says about human community or his legacy, his company is acting in its own interests—and against the public good.

Facebook’s crushing blow to independent media arrived last fall in Slovakia, Cambodia, Guatemala, and three other nations.The social giant removed stories by these publishers from users’ news feeds, hiding them in a new, hard-to-find stream. These independent publishers reported that they lost as much as 80 percent of their audience during this experiment.Facebook doesn’t care. At least, it usually seems that way… the company is now going ahead with similar changes to its news feed globally. These changes will likely de-prioritize stories from professional publishers, and instead favor dispatches published by a user’s friends and family. .. Many American news organizations will see the sharp traffic declines their brethren in other nations experienced last year—unless they pay Facebook to include their stories in readers’ feeds.

.. People say they’re interested in a broad range of news from different political preferences, but Facebook knows they really want angry, outraged articles that confirm political prejudices... Publishers in Slovakia and in the United States may warn of damage to democracy if Facebook readers receive less news, but Facebook knows people will be perfectly happy—perfectly engaged—with more posts from friends and families instead.

.. When people choose to subscribe to reliable news sources, they’re asking to go to the gym. With these newsfeed changes, Facebook threw out your gym shoes and subscribed you to a donut delivery service. Why do 2 billion people put up with a service that patronizingly reminds them that it’s designed for their well being, while it studiously ignores our stated preferences?
.. I think the only way Facebook will listen to people’s expressed preferences is if people start building better alternatives.
.. Right now, Facebook chooses what stories should top your news feed, optimizing for “engagement” and “time well spent.”
..Instead of telling Facebook what it should do, people should build tools that let them view the world the way they choose. If regulators force Facebook and other platforms to police news quality, they’ll give more control to a platform that’s already demonstrated its disinterest editorial judgment. A better path would be to force all platforms to adopt two simple rules:
  1. Users own their own data, including the content they create and the web of relationships they’ve built online. And they can take this data with them from one platform to another, or delete it from an existing platform.
  2. Users can view platforms like Facebook through an aggregator, a tool that lets you read social media through your own filters, like Gobo.
.. it either needs to learn to listen to its users stated desires, or it needs to make room for platforms that do.

a16z Podcast: Platforming the Future: Tim O’Reilly & Benedict Evans

Why do platforms make the mistake of competing with the participants in the ecosystems they create? (4:02 min)

Google’s original strength was as a switchboard, but it was attracted to the idea of being a destination platform. (8:30 min)

The Romans made the conquered tribes citizens.

There is this gravitational attraction for who knows the most about me. (18:40 min)

Could you imagine if it were Google that came out with the echo, a device that was always listening.

Amazon’s image gave it greater room to innovate.

Twitter Could Have Been A Protocol

The logic goes something like this:

  • Twitter is gaining widespread global adoption
  • Twitter has an open API that is easy to develop
  • Lots of apps are starting to use Twitter as a default ‘social exhaust’ system
  • Tweets are a highly structured atomic unit
  • Tweets can carry a link, meaning that almost any volume/format of information can be included in that atomic unit
  • Unlike HTTP, Twitter is accessible to end users without techincal backgrounds.
  • Tweets can be both public and private, allowing for different levels of ‘read’ permissions.
  • Therefor, Twitter is a likely candidate to become a sort default communications protocol, where content is generated and consumed primarily by other applications but “piped” through Twitter.

They actually built it.

They had an experimental project called ‘annotations’ where you could attach 1k of json to each tweet, like a DIY microformat.

I got onto the beta and created a prototype twitter client which you could attach mini ‘apps’ to tweets based on the payload type, e.g. you could tweet out a poll, or an inviation to play a game or a job advert or whatever, and you could attach your own app as a listener.

The plug was pulled around the same time the 3rd party apps were shut down.

.. I remember reading a lot of articles about Twitter’s “platform vs. protocol” future around 2010. But the writing was on the wall when Dick Costello (former COO) took over – he and the board saw the platform path as more profitable. It was around this time they restricted API access too.

Such a shame, but who knows if Twitter would still exist if they had tried the protocol route.