Slashdot Mirror
Top Publishers To Post News Stories Directly To Facebook Timelines
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC, BuzzFeed, NBC, The New York Times and National Geographic are among some of the publishers which will post news items directly to a Facebook user's timeline thanks to a new feature called Instant Articles. Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, says the program will allow publishers to “deliver fast, interactive articles while maintaining control of their content and business models.” Under the terms of the plan, publishers can sell and embed ads in the articles and keep the revenue, or allow Facebook to sell ads. Publishers will also be allowed to track data and traffic with their own analytics tools.
If publishers start posting their stuff direct to people facebook pages, I hope they're prepared for an endless stream of profanity laced responses from people who don't necessarily want that.
Careful what you wish for, you might not like the results.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Faced with plummeting usage, Facebook turns to Established Old School Media.
What could possibly go wrong?
Humm uh oh, will this start a Digg v4 phenomena on Facebook ?
This is great! i know everyone will enjoy the additional tracking these news publishers will employ. And thanks for giving me another reason to celebrate finally being off Facebook.
Hey now, I agree with you about almost all those guys, but leave Fuckwhistle out of it, he's the only one keeping this site together!
All the services running through that one interface? Maybe a spurious comparison ...
What the hell is a "fast, interactive article"? What do you want to bet there won't be a block or close button on them either.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Remember, when you are using Facebook, you are nothing but 'inventory' for advertisers.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There's also a Chris W. Cox, chief lobbyist for the United States National Rifle Association. Nothing but a meaningless coincidence, of course.
There'll come a day, not far from now, when the open web is regarded as something like the text usenet - a ghetto populated mainly by an ever-shrinking crowd of greybeards.
Several local businesses in my town only have a facebook presence. Our equivalent of NPR (funded mainly by tax money) is steadily shifting its web and email contact points over to facebook pages. Even the goverment is on 'social'.
It truly offends me that a man can't go about his life without being forced to pay for / use foreign commercial service providers. :
This will give facebook alot of control over which articles people see. I hope that people don't base their opinions only what they read on facebook. I hope people continue to look outside facebook for news. If not then zuckerberg could become too powerful. What happens if a news company reports negatively about facebook? Do they get dropped?
You only think you were never on facebook. They have photos of you, they know who you know and where you've been just from the content other people post on there (facial recognition in photos etc.) Also, every time you say a "like" button on an outside website, that image is often hosted on facebooks server, so they know which websites you are visiting and what sort of articles you like to read. Unless you have a plugin like Ghostery they are already tracking you.
Right now if you follow a new source on FB you get a little summary in your news feed. Then you click to the publisher's web site to read the story. In the new system, the content will be served up by Facebook without you actually visiting the third-party web site. From a user standpoint there may not be a big difference here. The /. crowd worries abut things like FB taking over the world. There's probably a legitimate concern with that. From a UI standpoint, an update by the New York Times isn't any different than an update from my nephew. From a security standpoint, it seems good that entire pages are served from the same domain and that the links point back to that same server. Less concern about a link to NewYorkT1mes leading me to trouble. You can still go to the publisher sites directly to read their stories but if you like using FB as a news aggregator this is an improvement. It's not a very *good* news aggregator but sounds like this is an attempt to change that. I'd love something that serves up news that I *care* about or, more specifically, news in proportion to how much I care about it. I might read one paragraph on what's happening in Yemen (seems to be an intractable problem where tactical updates don't really change the fundamentals) a sentence on DeflateGate but an entire long-format story on how school lunches affect education.
There are no pictures of me on the internet. Lucky me for being so fugly, I guess.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Samzenpus' shit-stirring title: "Top Publishers To Post News Stories Directly To Facebook Timelines"
First line of the article: "... which posts news items directly to a user’s newsfeed."
The use of "timeline" suggests these articles will be auto-posted to people's walls, which is not the case and would seriously annoy most people. Currently there is a side box of trending articles - this change, while still mildly annoying, will simply put the articles in your news stream where it is less easy to ignore.
...that I am not on Facebook.