Facebook is killing the open web?

Hossein Derakshan says Facebook and Instagram are creating bubbles of personal comfort:

Zuckerberg killed links (and the web) because he has created a space that is more like the future of television rather than the internet. Unlike what he preaches, Facebook has divided us into small personal bubbles of comfort. We don’t need to do anything, but to swipe with our thumbs (soon even that wouldn’t be necessary with eyeball detection systems).

All the videos, images, and articles we see in our newsfeeds are picked for us based on our habits, based on our previous likes and reshares, which have taught Facebook about our preferences. Naturally, most of us only like what or who we agree with, and Facebook therefore rarely upsets, challenges, or surprises us.

While Zuckerberg laments at walls and admires bridges, the fact is that his Facebook algorithms have created billions of these comfort bubbles that are even more isolating than walls. Also, he has destroyed the most powerful bridges that perhaps ever existed in the human history, the hyperlinks.

Remember AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy? Those services dominated the internet back in the early 90's. You paid a monthly subscription fee, and they provided internet access along with their own content feeds: news, stocks, weather, forums, etc. You could reach the early Web, but only after passing their portals.

Two things changed that: the spread of local ISP's, and the Netscape browser. ISP competition lowered subscription prices and increased innovation. Having a cheap browser meant people could break away from the big ISP's portals. They could go anywhere on the Web (even AOL's and Compuserve's sites).

That's about the time that content creation took off as well.

I agree with Derakshan that Facebook is a bad deal, for many of the same reasons those early service providers were a bad deal. But Facebook has something they didn't: networking.

Google Addresses the Newspaper Industry

Apparently I wasn't the only one confused by yesterday's attack on Google and other news aggregators. WSJ reports that Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, addressed the Newspaper Association's annual convention today:

Mr. Schmidt noted that Google has a multi-million dollar deal to host AP content on its pages. He added that he was "a little confused by all the excitement" in the media following the AP announcement on Monday. Mr. Schmidt, however, did not directly address the AP's initiative.

How could he directly address it? It didn't include any concrete proposals. If anything, it was an acknowledgment of how far behind the times newspapers have fallen.

I'm not sure I want Google owning any more of the news business than they currently do, but newspapers should pay attention to Schmidt's message. They need some deep thinking on how their business will evolve onto the web, and they need it soon.

A.P. vs. Web Aggregators

From the New York Times:

The Associated Press said on Monday that it will demand that Web sites obtain permission to use the work of The A.P. or its member newspapers, and share revenue with the news organizations, and that it will take legal action those that do not.

Associated Press executives said the policy was aimed at major search engines like Google, Yahoo and their competitors, and also at news aggregators like the Huffington Post, as well as companies that sell packaged news services. They said they do not want to stop the appearance of articles around the Web, but to exercise some control over it and to profit from it. The A.P. also said it is developing a system to track news articles online and determine whether they were used legally.

I'm confused: Are they talking about Google News or the Google search engine? Are they saying the snippets in Google News, HuffPo, and Yahoo News infringe A.P.'s copyright?

And this sounds interesting...

One goal of The A.P. and its members, [Sue Cross, VP of A.P.] said, is to make sure that the top search engine results for news are “the original source or the most authoritative source,” not a site that copied or paraphrased the work of news organization.

I see two ways to read that. Either she thinks Google and Yahoo should be the top-level news producers, or she thinks the news aggregators should modify their indexing algorithms to somehow favor the "news origination" site. I think that means she wants Google News, for example, to be able to somehow identify which news organization (e.g. NYT, WaPo, Podunk Daily News, etc.) originally broke the story and give precedence to their online article. The news aggros might not mind doing that, but does the A.P. even know which organization broke the story, and do they have the source URL? I'm guessing not.

Or is she saying Google's main search engine should weight source organization url's? If so she's crazy. Search engines by definition are site agnostic: a web site is a web site.

Meanwhile, aren't these source organizations already getting paid? Don't you have to pay A.P. to print or post any article? And as part of the deal, don't you have to print the byline? So people already know where the article came from, and can either link through to the source or search for it in (you guessed it) Google?

Alright, I'm still confused.