Beside being a Facebook user, are you a blogger? vlogger? Twitter user? Friendfeed? Tumblr?
Have you noticed that Facebook has been sucking interactions with your content from your original source into Facebook feed?
If yes, that’s how Facebook is becoming the skeleton of the Internet.
Facebook has become ubiquitous that people keep staying inside Facebook, expecting to consume information from everywhere. Facebook is doing well to satisfy this need of convenience, allowing information inflow by both implementing functions itself and providing being the platform for respective service provider to develop Facebook applications.
Results:
- Convenience for users
- Explorability of information from the world’s largest hub
- Distribution of interactions from original site to other hubs, notably Facebook
- Facebook ecology is becoming Facebook economy, centralizing human connectedness depicted by social graphs
Anything has its down side. The issues are
- Interactions within original service (Twitter, Tumblr) are always richer in essence than two actions “Comment” and “Like” on Facebook. Twitter has retrievable favorite, retweet; Tumblr has retrievable like, reblog… If people keep using Facebook and neglect the other services, this richness is not utilized to its fullest potentials
- As a result of (1), innovation elsewhere other than Facebook is gradually killed off
- As to fuel destruction of their “complementors”, Facebook has been cloning interesting nice features of elegant services including Twitter, Tumblr and swallowed Friendfeed
As for me, interactions with my Tumblr items by my connections who use both Facebook and Tumblr are now done on Facebook. More “likes” on Facebook, fewer “reblogs” on Tumblr. These posts are read, liked, then dispersed down Facebook stream. They have not been recreated and passed on by being reblogged.
By becoming the main stream of information, Facebook is depressing contents and innovation.
There’s the price publishers pay to distribute information on Facebook. There’s the price other service providers pay to spread contents hosted on them onto Facebook. The price by information consumers residing on Facebook will only be realized when real casualties have been done.
Are you a publisher or a consumer? What do you think?
Addendum
Facebook gives power to the crowd, turns innovators & trend-setters into followers of the consuming herd.
Social media begins to look less social and it need to be so because:
Major online communities usually start with a small group of smart, motivated, everybody-knows-everbody contributors. After crossing critical mass, such communities start to attract more users which is a good thing. The bad thing is that trolls also jump in. What’s more, noise and irrelevant information start to emerge from clueless or, worse, malicious posters.
Two types of community are somewhat immune to such annoyance:
- Social networks, led by Facebook , with which you determine your social graph of those you care about
- Services which you determine the content you want, led by Twitter. Others may include Tumblr, twine, squidoo. Addendum: Twitter got better with lists.
I’m sorry, Digg.
What’s the solution? Channel, possibly?
- They regain focus by releasing the new search with local search.
- They put on the negotiate the crucial contract with Microsoft to prolong the search war saga.
- They trim off “bad Yahoo!”.
- They save costs on R&D by cloning Tumblr for their new service Meme.
- They regained email market share with new improvements to Yahoo! Mail.
- And they impose higher alpha than expected.
Welcome back on track, Yahoo!
Uncategorized
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alpha, clone, mail, meme, microsoft, price, r&d, search, share, tumblr, yahoo!
Yahoo! Meme, the tumblelog service originally launched in Portugese, rolled out its English interface.
This won’t pose a threat to Twitter, but to Tumblr.
Especially in Vietnam, where Yahoo! Messenger still plays the center role of communication on the internet. If Yahoo! integrate Meme and Messenger, definitely the adoption rate for Vietnamese users will be high.
Frankly, Yahoo! Meme can’t be compared with Tumblr in product innovation and features, but network effect plus simplicity give Yahoo! a good starting point.
Let’s hope Yahoo! Meme can stand the load of millions, unlike its crippled elder sister Yahoo! 360.
If you’re interested, follow me at meme.yahoo.com/taitran
- To post on the go with push email
- To post complicated articles with a lot of notations and photos such as this one. For this usage, Posterous = Scribd + WordPress
- To post professional photo albums, such as one from a professional event. Facebook won’t do since it resizes the images to 604px width. Plus, posting to a blog-like site like Posterous gives more feeling of going-with-the-event than uploading the photos to Picasa, Photobucket
- To post materials for collaborative team projects. It’s easy enough for my non-savvy teams
- To post my old swf files
How about you? What do you use Posterous for?
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