That was the whole point of the social reader - integration with open graph. Removing that and there was no reason for them to build it in the first place. If you didn't want to share what you were reading automatically you could just go to the regular website and use the regular sharing/like button. I was very particular about which stories I viewed through it. It's surprising the articles you read on a news site that you'd prefer not be shared.
It's more than just privacy, it's about utility: there's a huge difference in signal between an active recommendation for something from someone I trust, and the firehose of seeing everything they click on. The latter just tells me what headlines appeal to them, if that.
Yeah, I was embarrassed whenever I'd click on a linkbait headline, get disappointed, and then other people saw I'd fallen for it. There was no good way to indicate "wow, this sucked" other than manually deleting it from my newsfeed or adding a comment.
I ended up just blocking the social apps entirely. In general, I hate facebook apps that exist on-facebook; I like the external use of the social graph by some other sites.
Whenever I'd try to visit a news link on facebook that one of my other friends had read (and had it autopost to the timeline) it would always try to get ME to sign up as well. I'm really suspicious of that stuff, so I always refused it and either decided I didn't care about the article or used google to find it on my own. I was always paranoid I'd click on some article that would actually turn out to be, I don't know, the secret sex lives of snails or something, and I'd be really embarrassed by it. (Why does a news application need access to all my personal info, anyway? I'm not agreeing to that!!)
It's great to hear that newspapers are starting to reject it. I really hate the idea of facebook becoming its own walled garden affair. Especially because there's no way to tell wtf is ever going on it, it doesn't show me half of what I want to see...so now I barely use it and have just left it up for party invites and all the nontech people who act like you're asking them to get a tooth extracted if you expect them to actually e-mail instead of sending a fbook message :/
I think I'm a "tech person" by most definitions, and I still like using fb messages vs. email in a lot of cases. It's a great directory service (I still don't have a good address book for mutt), shows presence (which is missing from email), and the integrated-IM is even better than google (because it doesn't end up sending messages to my desktop if I'm on my phone, etc.)
Yeah, everyone's different, plus it depends a lot on the situation (short message vs. long message, importance, is there an attachment, etc). Most of the people I know who insist on facebook messages -only- are more the type that can't figure out how to even open a zip file.
Also, a lot of people I know got hit in a round of account deletions and got majorly screwed over because they were conducting all their freelance business through fb messages (and then had no way to communicate with their clients, since neither of them had each other's e-mail). Because of that, it just feels more unsafe to me, like I could lose all my data at any time. Plus they keep doing weird things like deciding what posts I want to see from my friends (I'd like to see all of them by default?? if they are annoying then I will change it), constantly resetting my news feed to "top stories!" and etc. I guess I don't trust them not to mess up the messaging too and then maybe I'll miss a message from someone about something that's really important.
I agree that it works fairly well as a directory. I wish there were something like facebook that wasn't facebook, but none of the alternatives seem to have caught on quite as well yet. (also--I hope my original post didn't insult you or anyone else reading it on here, that wasn't my intention at all.)
Spamming your friends with various bits of information like that is terrible. they should have a tab MISC on facebook to track state changes and stuff like what everybody else reads. Status updates and picture posts should be the only things on the first tab of the news feed. Right now at least for me newsfeed is very hard to read and in a very linear fashion - but then I read that was the intent of the facebook to increase engagement of their advertising services.
Facebook seems to do a pretty good job of tuning the newsfeed for me. I "only important updates" a few people, and block most apps, and everything else is either people I really care about or is interesting stuff about other people. I do "like" things I like, which may get fed back into the algorithm.
What really impresses me is how it deals with Quora. Most Quora actions are boring (especially since I see them on the site itself), and they all go to fb, but I only see interesting ones.
What it meant was that when I saw a link to an article a friend had shared, I had to copy it into a google search to find the original page.
I was never, ever, going to let the Guardians app access my Facebook, and stopping me from following interesting links purely because of that was idiotic.
Does anyone else get the feeling that the newspapers really have no clue what they are doing? Paywall. No paywall. Paywall again. Login required. No login required. Facebook-only. No Facebook.
There doesn't seem to be any sort of overarching strategy here, just flailing.
I see exploration, which in a changing industry is always essential. Compare with the steps Hollywood and the music industry take to adapt.
Perhaps you find annoying that they are exploring without sticking to certain "principles": "free access" and "no walled gardens". I would guess that part of their exploration consists of searching for which principles they can stick to without having to close down.
The Guardian, in particular, has an unusual ownership [1] and they probably need to explore solutions in rather unusual ways.
They don't have a clue what they're doing because they've never been where they are before.
Pretty much since the first newspaper was printed, the industry's entire business model depended on being the main source of distribution of general information to a geographically defined audience.
Now that the internet is here, the model of distribution they've spent hundreds of years refining is practically useless and their audience is no longer clearly defined, but they're still saddled with hundreds of years of processes and experience.
In reality, it's actually very impressive that an organization like the Guardian is willing to try, fail, and try again the way they are.
I, for one, hope they can figure out something that works.
I spent over a year at two leading newspapers recently, launching both of their new sites.
I would strongly disagree they don't know what their doing, in terms of commercial partnerships, cross promotional ideas and monetization of content you'll actually find that most media agencies follow their lead. Of course mistakes will be made along the way (as others have rightfully pointed out), but its a massive challenge.
Lets Summarize newspapers, they produce original content at cost (writers, editors, designers, photos (getty etc) offices and everything else, they try to achieve top rankings in SERPS (SEO, Analysts) and then go out and try to get money from advertisers (sales execs, ad networks, managers etc) whilst competing with hundreds of other companies offering views at lower rates to sell the number of eyes that look at that content at a competitive price.
Most newspapers are barely breaking even, so give them a bit of slack for at least trying new methods and ideas.
IMO with the Guardian you'd be wrong - them and the NYTimes are the two leading the way in transforming newspapers online. They've yet to find the Holy Grail for their future business but things like their data blog have been groundbreaking - http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog
Fish out of water flail. It's all they know how to do.
You make an observation that I agree with. The very few Old School Publishing people that I have brushed past in my life keep this observation alive with their hand wringing. (If it weren't for the handwringing, I might be tempted to call such activity 'exploration'...) But it seems to be what happens to organizations that get large and comfortable- they can't imagine life any other way, and when that way of life is threatened, they try to hold on.
It reminds me of the people living in a hurricane's landing zone. We know it's a killer hurricane, we know it's coming ashore, but these people will not be moved, will not be threatened to leave their homes by ... this inanimate storm that doesn't care whether your home is in its path or not.
My 'advice' to these companies: the market doesn't care whether your particular company survives. Its participants only care about their own desires- consuming quality content, being entertained, keeping their own costs down, etc.
That doesn't make any sense. Startups are not fully invested in any product or process, so they are nimble. Newspapers however are the exact opposite of startups: they have been here for a very long time. They already have well-established products. They don't have the luxury of just flailing around by throwing shit on a wall and seeing what sticks.
Actually, since they have more money and are more established, I would argue that they do have the luxury of throwing shit on the wall and seeing what sticks. The reason we have companies in this country that are over 100 years old is because they were able to pivot long after they were established.
There are a great many people who do know what they are doing, but do not know what will necessarily be successful.
The newspaper industry is currently in a situation nothing like anything it's ever seen. So there's a lot of experimentation- which, yes, includes some failures along the way. If it helps, I'll start referring to it as 'pivoting'.
The Guardian actually had a link, that wasn't super visible, that would direct you from using the app to the website, if you clicked it it'd remember your decision and never bug you again. It was excellent, none of the other news publishers did it.
News publishers had a range of choices on how to implement this. ProPublica did not enable frictionless sharing or an automatic dialog box asking you to install an app
I don't think the app was particularly popular leading me to wonder "what's the point?" (I used to work there) but I suppose for users who choose to live their lives through FB, giving them the choice of sharing and consuming through FB isn't necessarily a net negative
There was a post of what internet was and what was lost - how social media and prevelance of scocial graph as a tool has changed the game. But it is not quite certain that everyone is the winner for using a social graph except the company that manages is it. I think the process and environment surrouning social graphs has been corrupted and developed not in very forward looking way and things like that happend because of that.
Frankly facebook I think has bungled the whole advertising and integration of various internet services into crowded space on the 'wall'. There is much distraction, few pictures and no action.
> When the Guardian social reader first launched, the impact was dramatic: millions of users installed the app within a matter of weeks (a total of 12 million have installed it so far, according to the Guardian post) and by April of this year, 6 million unique visitors were reading content within the app every month. According to former Guardian developer Martin Belam, Facebook referrers at one point even eclipsed traffic coming from Google. After the changes in May, however, the number of readers dropped just as dramatically — falling from about 600,000 average users a day to below the 200,000 level. Facebook now reports the app as having 2.5 million monthly users.
This needs a little more context, doesn't it? Did usage drop because the app is unpopular? Did it drop because the Guardian is unpopular? Or is Facebook losing share overall?
In other words, FB giveth and FB taketh away. The popular explanation may be that users were just fed up with the intrusion in their lives and the Guardian is making a principled stand...but let's face it, users have shown more than enough willingness to accept intrusions. And the Guardian clearly isn't doing this out of respect for their users' privacy...anger over inadvertent sharing was immediate at the app's launch, and the Guardian always had the option of turning off the auto-sharing element.
That said, I'm not sure why the drop in usage requires killing the app. A referral is a referral, right? Did the app require constant maintenance? There are some users who love sharing what they read and so why not let them continue to do so and configure the app to not make such links lead to a "do you want to install this app" popup.
"This needs a little more context, doesn't it? Did usage drop because the app is unpopular? Did it drop because the Guardian is unpopular? Or is Facebook losing share overall?"
None, FB launched the opengraph plugin with a preferred list of partners, after the initial bedding in period other media companies were allowed to join, thus saturating the market and taking % share (UV).
I'm always amazed when I see companies make the mistake of giving facebook control over their business, pushing facebook's brand over their own, and driving people away from their own site instead of towards it. What is so special about facebook that makes marketing people forget everything they learned about marketing?
It's where the eyeballs are. There's an enormous amount of collective time spent on Facebook these days. If you can capture a fraction of that, even if it's just in the form of brand recognition, that's a potential win.
You seem to have misunderstood. The fact that lots of people use facebook means marketers should be using facebook to push their brand, and engage with potential customers. Instead, they are pushing facebook's brand, and telling customers to go to facebook. Users are already at facebook, so that is just dumb, and a waste of money. Every time you see a TV ad where some company says "go to facebook.com/stupidcompany" instead of sending people to stupidcompany.com is the backwards mentality I refer to in action.
