Facebook Could Become World's Leading News Reader (Sorry Google)
From TV to Tivo and Hulu, from the mall to Amazon and eCommerce and from newspaper carriers and delivery trucks to online syndication and subscription - distribution of goods, services and information has changed a lot thanks to the internet. Subscription to syndicated publications hasn't changed nearly as much yet as it could in the future, though.
Services like MyYahoo and iGoogle saw some traction and many readers here may have a Google Reader account, but dedicated RSS (really simple syndication) feed reading services have never lived up to their potential to become a mainstream phenomenon. These days many people say they just wait until links get shared on Twitter and they never use a feed reader at all. Late last week Facebook threw its hat in the ring and called on users to use its service as a news feed reader. There are a number of reasons why Facebook could be the strongest online subscription option yet.
Update: Hard numbers have now confirmed that Facebook is already the biggest news reader on the web. In our next post on the subject, we discuss the implications of Facebook's relatively small market share on the future of free thinking.
If you publish content on the web and are looking for maximum distribution, you probably know that Facebook is the promised land. The site is about 10 times as big as Digg or Twitter but so far has been less focused on sharing and clicking links. If Facebook can become the go-to place for hundreds of millions of users to find news (and that seems quite likely, doesn't it) then the company is going to be in a very good position.
Last week, Facebook's Malorie Lucich posted to the company blog encouraging users set up their Facebook accounts for news reading. Lucich suggested becoming a "fan" of news organizations that publish to Facebook, then adding those connections to a dedicated "list" that only displays updates from news sources. You can subscribe that way to ReadWriteWeb here for example, to the New York Times, to the Environmental Justice Foundation or to thousands upon thousands of other organizations that publish regularly, usually with RSS under the hood.
Facebook could make some interface changes that would make this news-reader model all the easier, but this use case is quite compelling already. Facebook will never replace a dedicated RSS reader (or 5) for serious professional use but the fact is that the vast majority of people online have not begun to take advantage of the powerful subscription options that the web now allows. Online syndication has huge disruptive potential, not the least of which is access to larger audiences for smaller voices than they've ever been able to access before.
Is Google Reader better than Facebook for reading feeds? Maybe. There are RSS readers that are better than Google Reader, too. But in terms of change-the-world feed-reading mass adoption - it's most likely to be Facebook that gets millions of mainstream users on board.
Here's why Facebook could become a world-changing subscription platform.
- Hundreds of millions of people already use Facebook to keep up with friends and family. It's an interface they know and love. The newsfeed model has been popularized by Facebook and so encouraging news subscription through it will be infinitely easier than trying to get people to use something new.
- Special messages can be posted directly to readers. Facebook isn't a rigid "publish and subscribe" only channel, it's a broader opportunity for communication than dedicated RSS readers offer. That makes more sense to users and is compelling to publishers.
- Facebook provides a common area to see all discussion around news. Google Reader added a long list of social features to its service over the past few years but social just turned into clutter and weighed the service down. Social + news in Facebook makes sense.
- Reader interaction expands distribution into larger, social contexts. When you "like" or comment on a news item, that shows up on your profile page and in the live feeds of all your friends. Thus they are exposed to whatever publishers you're a fan of. Likewise, as of December the pages you're a fan of (i.e. subscribed to) have been irrevocably visible to the public at large on your profile page. While it is a major privacy problem that people are no longer allowed to have private subscriptions on Facebook, the fact that they are public increases the likelihood that new people will discover those news sources and become fans themselves.
- Partial feeds are good for readers. Back in the early days of dedicated RSS readers, a debate raged about whether publishers should distribute their full news stories in their feeds or whether it's ok to publish just an excerpt and require readers to click through and view ads in order to read the whole story. Geeky early adopters clearly expected full-feeds, but imagine full feeds showing up in your Facebook interface! No way. Nice, scannable excerpts serve readers well there and the requirement that links be clicked and ads viewed serve publishers well, giving them more reason to promote Facebook subscription than many publishers ever felt they had to promote RSS subscription.
- The branded logo of become a fan on Facebook is more powerfully communicative than the community-standard orange broadcast logo of an RSS feed. Click on an RSS icon and most people will just get confused. Click on the logo of the monolithic Facebook and you're subscribed. Sometimes drastically reducing choices makes them more likely to participate. That's not pretty, but it's realistic.
- Finally, "Become a Fan" is a relatively clear call to action. It's emotionally resonate and very obviously free of charge. Most people probably don't even know they are subscribing to updates when they become a fan of something on Facebook. Maybe that will change, though. Using the word "subscribe" explicitly harkens a different media era, though, when subscription was almost never free.
Facebook is a publishing, syndication and subscription platform where the interests of the reader, the publisher and the platform provider are all in sync. That's powerful. Subscription through Facebook may be sterile, hermetically sealed and controlled by one too-powerful communication company but it works. Facebook clearly has an opportunity to become the subscription mechanism of choice for hundreds of millions of readers and for millions of publishing organizations. That's a good place for any company to be.
You can subscribe to (and discuss the future of the Web with) ReadWriteWeb on Facebook here.
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Not to pat myself on the back too much but I made this call almost a year ago...
http://abovethenoise.blogspot.com/2009/03/rss-for-masses.html
Way to go Perry. I have been trying to get everyone to Facebook that I can.
Damn, how many McDonald's ads can you have on one page?
Just started segmenting my news stream into substreams as the amounts of "updates" are getting higher and higher as I increase my "is fan of" subscribing.
Splitting into list is a poor work around for simulating RSS-reader functionality - do hope facebook improve this.
***
yes - way to many mcdonald's ads on this page ....
This could set journalism back 100s of years.
Next thing you know stories will be limited to 140 characters.
It sounds like the perfect job for the Friendfeed crew to develop, unless they have them working on something more important.
Very interesting insight... I'm the founder of Mozzler, which aims to combine Twitter and Facebook updates into a single RSS-like stream of news, providing the best of both worlds.
If you're interested, follow @mozzler_news on Twitter and there will be an announcement later this week for beta testers.
Chris
Great post Marshall. I imagine all the major aggregators and social networks will have some variation on this. Search is clearly a maturing technology but discovery/recommendations, whether for news or other types of content, is still in its infancy.
Clearly, Facebook's ability to do collaborative filtering on its social graph at scale will give them significant advantages. But their layout, while simple and familiar, is very limited for this problem. Google Reader may be bit heavy handed with its options, but Facebook's layout isn't amenable to the functionality that mainstream users will want (e.g., ways to delve into and navigate recommendations). Unless Facebook has something significant cooking in the kitchen, I think this addition will be a nice feature--but just a feature.
Ali Davar, Worio
Maybe so, Marshall, but FB has a lot of work to do on speed. Right now I'm showing a Don Dodge twitter post in my FB Live Feed from "11 minutes ago" that Twitter shows as posted over an hour ago, and our site's fan page posts sometimes don't post for many many hours.
No doubt the social nets will head in this direction. It will only increase the amount of time spent within their application. Today, most social networks are not focused on aggregating news however it will be a growth area. I have to believe for the average person, outside the Silicon Valley, Facebook is a great news reader.
Cheers,
Bill Flitter
Founder, Dlvr.it
http://Dlvr.it
Interesting perception Marshall. Now here's an opportunity for someone to help people find the fan pages:
I have 500+ feeds in Google reader, segmented into a half dozen folders. I'd port the whole thing to FB just to try out the process, but.....have no idea where what the FB pages are.
Google Social Circles feature seem like it might help make some of those connections, but it doesn't update in real time, and has no search.
It's very important to consider what the news publishers prefer as well, seeing as ultimately they're the ones that can make or break whichever method they choose. With Facebook, as you quite rightly point out, they have the advantage of sharing and linking not to mention the ability to be able to see and communicate with their users in an easy going manner. It does however leave them with the same old problem of how to monetize the content. I bet they wish the word 'subscribe' was a bit more popular!
Have a feeling this will end up being the National Enquirer of news sources... greeeat....
I use Facebook for this purpose, receiving updates from brands, artists, blogs, agencies and news outlets. As mentioned in the comments I would also add the Facebook Pages for all the Google Reader subscriptions. With impressions now available to Pages and the ability to engage with fans this has enough potential!!
hey Marshall:
you might want to let your readers know there is already a newsreader app for facebook called http://NetworkedBlogs.com (one of our fbFund companies from last summer, founder Waleed Abdulla).
To use the app on Facebook, go here:
http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/index.php
In fact, your screenshot is actually showing a NetworkedBlogs news article (that's the little orange-blue icon in the newsfeed). their app already has several hundred thousand users on Facebook and over 2M+ blogs indexed.
anyway your larger point is still very relevant, but worth discussing the other apps that are already using Facebook infrastructure to do this.
[disclosure: i'm an investor, but even tho i'm pimping it's still cool shit]
Facebook is becoming the central hub of everything. And, unlike Google Reader, where the system is closed, the Facebook platform allows third party apps to add to the experience; which is a huge advantage. It's more accurate to view the Facebook stream as an ecosystem to which many apps contribute, as opposed to the one isolated Google Reader app. And it's also worthwhile to study the individual apps that contribute to the stream, as they are an integral part of the overall experience.
When it comes to news, our app, NetworkedBlogs, is one of those third-party apps that extend the news reading experience on Facebook and helps hundreds of thousands of bloggers get their content into the stream. It also offers a different way to digest the news on Facebook that a lot of our users like.
Thanks for covering this topic. It's definitely interesting to watch how our news reading habits change as new technologies come along.
Interesting thought. I haven't considered using Facebook this way before, but considering that FB has become such a mainstay platform of communication, it makes sense.
Personally, I rely on Google Reader for all of my news consumption - I just prefer the clutter-free interface and quick loading times. But for the non-power user, Facebook would probably be a much more reasonable alternative -- a form of RSS for the average person.
Actually, I recently heard that Facebook is developing there own browser. They will really be going head to head with Google. I think that the phenomena is really interesting. Thanks for the news!
Another important argument - everyone already checks their Facebook every day in a way they find convenient; I've tried to evangelize for readers to people and it's just one more thing.
The update bursts in the Facebook news feed are richer than those in Twitter: possibility of including pictures, videos, no 140 character limit, etc.
But judging from the Netflix ad pictured in the RWW feed above, I'm assuming that we'll often see ad units run against the content of news items. I can imagine a CNN update along the lines of "Swine flu claims three new victims" with a perfectly matched ad extolling the virtues of GSK's vaccines (and its money printing operation, too).
Yeah, corporations must be salivating at the precision with which they can match ads to breaking news items using almighty Facebook.
This is a very interesting topic that has important implications for the future of the social web and the way we consume content.
Personally, I don't like the model put forward here. The utility of facebook as a feed reader is dubious given how cumbersome the setup process is. Assuming the average user scales the setup hurdle the model would be:
1. see article excerpt on FB
2. go to publisher site to read article
3. comment and discuss back on FB?
This is not better than:
1. Read full article in Google Reader (publishers can monetize these subscriptions through in-feed ads)
I'd rather have my social graph follow me around in my browser chrome and be social around content published on publisher domains.
After last night's rollout of Facebook's new home page design I have updated my quick guide on how to set Facebook as a News Reader: The interface changed a bit and finding "All Connections" and your customized lists on Facebook requires some work :D
http://www.bealoud.com/social-media/facebook-news-reader/
I hope you enjoy it :)
Another important argument - everyone already checks their Facebook every day in a way they find convenient