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.
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!
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. :
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.