What Facebook could really do for news
'All the news that's fit to share...'
Rumors are spreading that Facebook has some grand designs on e-mail and instant messaging in the hopes of knocking Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft off their blocks (see Techcrunch). But I was more interested in Derek Thompson’s blog post at The Atlantic about how Facebook is becoming the real news portal for the world these days. He noted that 3.52% of media site traffic is coming from Facebook, a doubling in the past six months. He then argued that it’s not a surprise:
But the emergence of Facebook as a real driver of news stories tells us something important about how news works. Getting our news from our friends is nothing new. It’s as old as the concept of neighborhood gossip. But if Hitwise analytics are capturing a true trend in media, and the share of Facebook outbound links really doubled in the last six months, it paints the picture of an increasingly nichefied world of news readers. Friends are reading what their friends are reading, who are reading what their friends are reading, and so on. It presages the deterioration of top-down news, and the rise of news-reading groups whose news sources and opinions become a centripetal, self-perpetuated cycle of information — or disinformation.
via Is Facebook, Not Google, the Real Global Newspaper? – The Atlantic Business Channel.
Here’s the thing: while I’m interested in what my friends read on Facebook, I’m not only interested in what my friends read. A lot of them share really cool links, but I know that they can’t account for everything cool that’s going on in the world of the tubes.
Thus I’m interested in what people other than my 1,100 friends are reading. And that’s why I turn to sites like Memeorandum, the Drudge Report, Raw Story, Reddit, the Slatest, Fimoculous, Romenesko, Buzzfeed, and The Daily What. Because my friends don’t read everything, nor do they share everything, and sometimes other people are cooler than my friends. So with Facebook now accounting for a broader swath of the Internet-using population, indeed, the entire population, and not just the educated upper crust that it was originally designed for, the social network site should do for us what these other sites do, but like Google News in an algorithmic fashion. I should be able to bring up news.facebook.com and read the top 100 articles that people are sharing across the Facebook network at any given moment.
To accomplish this end, Facebook needs to start talking to media companies. Develop a standard that they can integrate into the underlying code of their websites so that Facebook can search what’s popping across its network. Make it comparable to what Google News requires of you now in terms of building sitemaps that their search engine can read effectively.
But this product in a lot of ways will be far superior to Google News, which a lot of companies have figured out how to game. It will be a purely meritorious aggregator telling you not what news stories have been best optimized for search by clever engineering staffs working for news outlets, but what news is actually of interest to the broader Facebook audience. 500,000 people sharing ABC’s report on skidding Toyota Priuses? It’s on the Facebook News page. 200,000 people commenting on Matt Taibbi’s defense of populism against Wall Street on True/Slant? Find it on news.facebook.com. 1.5 million people ‘liking’ The Daily Beast’s expose of the secrets of the American Idol audtions? You’ll see it on Facebook’s news aggregation page.
It would be easy, and it would be powerful. C’mon guys – make it happen, I can’t wait to use it, and I bet a lot of other people would be with me.
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Read the “Diffusion of Innovation”. Moral of the story: information sharing (news gathering) only among your closer friends makes you a laggard. Gathering “cosmopolitan” sources of info (i.e. from far away places outside your circle of friends) enables technological leadership.
Short term, FB will bring up the average. Long term, the average has an inertia of its own.
Reading sources beyond your closest circle of friends is admirable and, as SteveInTransit notes, recommended. With hope, the incestuousness of link selection gets weaker as you move out from the inner orbitals: links from friends of friends should have a bit more variety than those from direct-connections. Facebook will have to – and likely will – find ways to surface those links for you to easily find them.
As for “a purely meritorious aggregator telling you not what news stories have been best optimized for search by clever engineering staffs working for news outlets, but what news is actually of interest to the broader Facebook audience,” it’s pretty to think so. This is the same Facebook that uses pictures of your mother and ex-girlfriend to sell you car insurance and deoderant (at least on mine; I don’t have 1,100 profile photos for it to select from, though). I wouldn’t imagine for many seconds that, if having an editor for news.fb.com and every other “brandable” page turned out to be a better way to make the advertisers feel safe, Facebook would address that in a blink. And they’d be right in doing so.
One point of the Atlantic piece, similar thoughts coming out of MarshalK at ReadWriteWeb and from the Hitwise report mentioned, is that links on Facebook get clickthroughs. Efficient clickthroughs beget clever engineering: there’s no reason to think figuring out how to get play on news.fb.com will take much longer than it did for SEO experts and “enterprising cabals” to crack Google and Digg.
A good editor, armed with the most recommended, clicked-though and otherwise-interesting links, still beats the crap out of pure lists of Most Shared.
I don’t think these approaches of pure popularity vs. human-managed feeds are mutually exclusive – you could have one just totaling up the number of shared news links on the same story, the other a human-managed ‘rising’ feed like you see on Reddit.
But I think that if the standard were designed properly, it would effectively be un-gameable. If a story from a Facebook News partner got shared by a single user, it gets counted, once. Unless someone set up a network of zombie Facebook profiles, and that’s something Facebook could take care of the way it does now with spam accounts.
So, sure, I’m all in favor of Facebook hiring some human editors, just like Yahoo Buzz benefits from having robot- and human-selected news. But purely in terms of showing us what inidivdual news links in the past 24 hours, or past 2 hours, or whatever, is most shared on Facebook, that’d be a powerful tool.
In response to another comment. See in context »don’t forget breibart, wnd, michael savage website
While it’s admirable to read beyond what yourfriends read, I’d also be curious to see how diverse the sources of this “news” would be. As I’ve blogged here, I think it’s increasingly essential in a global economy to not stick to sources of media that are American only; even without additional language skills, one can read a range of foreign media.
Just because millions are reading the same thing doesn’t mean it has inherent value — it’s popular.
My experience with sites like Reddit and Digg says to me that the sources really are quite diverse, including non-American, English-language sources. The cool thing about ‘popularity’ is the surprises it produces – in an open-ended system. I think what you find is that a lot of the ‘public’ who actually take the initiative to share something are more edgy than you might expect.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Amber Nettles, SteveTaff, SteveTaff, Tweets Tube, Jane Nathaniel and others. Jane Nathaniel said: What Facebook could really do for news: He noted that 3.52% of media site traffic is coming from Facebook, a doubl… http://bit.ly/9IYlPn [...]
Have you used this at all?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/
I have not. I vastly prefer True/Slant’s headline grab which allows me to choose which articles I read that I want to share with the world as opposed to every single dumb thing I click on :)
In response to another comment. See in context »ah – so the way that works is I log in and everything I click through become part of my activity stream? my entire browsing session (once I come out of “stealth mode”) on HuffPo is published?
that is … interesting.
I am in the process of using your “vastly prefer T/S’ headline grab” in a follow-up article, then.
many thanks!
In response to another comment. See in context »That’s my understanding. Lewis has an amusing story about this that I’m sure he’d be happy to share with you.
In response to another comment. See in context »