One Man's Opinion -- for what it's worth

To:       Jay Rosen - jr3@nyu.edu

Cc:       Jeff Jarvis - jeff@buzzmachine.com

Cc:       Ken Doctor - kdoctor@gmail.com

Cc:       Dean Starkman - dean@deanstarkman.com

Cc:       Clay Shirky - (Address unknown, please forward)

Cc:       Bill Domhoff - domhoff@ucsc.edu

Cc:       Dave Carr - carr@nytimes.com

Cc:       Mathew Ingram - mathew@gigaom.com

Cc:       Doc Searls - dsearls@cyber.law.harvard.edu

Cc:       Dave Winer - dave.winer@gmail.com

Cc:       Glenn Greenwald - GGreenwald@salon.com

Cc:       Paul Krugman - (Address unknown, please forward)

From:  Doug Skoglund - skoglund@pdmsb.com

Date:   Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Subject: My Way LXXX - I Second That!!

Mathew Ingram, GigaOM, wrote, "The decline of social-news apps and Facebook as a gatekeeper":

Handing control to Facebook is a Faustian bargain

At the same time, however, the deal that the Post and others have made with Facebook is very much a Faustian bargain, as I tried to point out when these social-reading apps were first launched. Can they drive traffic? Obviously they can. And it's true that going where the readers are is a good strategy -- just as it was when newspapers created portals inside America Online or CompuServe, or distributed "interactive CD-ROMs."

But there is also an important reality when you make an arrangement like that, and it is that Facebook owns you, in the sense that it controls access to your content. It controls who sees it and when, and it controls how it is displayed -- or even whether it is displayed. Turning over your reader comments to Facebook can be a double-edged sword in exactly the same way: yes, it takes care of things like trolls and spam (to a certain extent) by outsourcing all that to Facebook, but you may not always want Facebook to control whether a comment is posted or not.

As Michael Zimbalist of the New York Times research lab pointed out in a comment on Twitter, this is the same kind of lesson that startups of all kinds have had to learn about Google, which has a habit of changing the terms of its APIs and other services suddenly, thereby crippling or even killing</a> entire business models with one fell swoop. Amazon -- another platform disguised as a company -- has done similar things with its APIs, which has also been a wakeup call for young companies.

Apple, of course, has by far the most iron grip over what content and features publishers or anyone else can offer -- and even how they can offer it, something that has soured a growing number of magazine and newspaper publishers on the iTunes model. The lure of these giant platforms is undeniable: they can expose your content to far greater numbers of people than you could ever do on your own. But never forget that they control every aspect of the crucial levers driving that business, not you.

Great post, Mathew, you are on a roll -- keep it up!!!!!

To be continued (I Hope)

Doug Skoglund skoglund@pdmsb.com

BTW, my software, a work in process, contains a sample demo and is available for download at http://pdmsb.com/download. (I call them SAMinars - for SandS Application Machine seminars)

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