Facebook As Your News Filter
Ben Gladstone, 17/02/2010, posted in "Analysis"
Ben Gladstone is an entrepreneur and CEO and founder of IT services firm, Conosco. Ben did a stint with Coopers & Lybrand, and then co-founded Obongo, a Silicon Valley ...more info
Ben Gladstone is an entrepreneur and CEO and founder of IT services firm, Conosco. Ben did a stint with Coopers & Lybrand, and then co-founded Obongo, a Silicon Valley software company, leading the team that invented, patented and developed the technology for managing online passwords and credit card data. Then in frustration at the lack of high quality computer support for small businesses, he set up Conosco in the mid noughties. ...less info
Murdoch and Cuban, get over it – we’re all getting our news through filters these days. And now Facebook is joining Twitter, Viewsflow, Google, blogs or just friends’ emails as a source of trusted recommendations of what to read. Few people loyally subscribe to a single news source in the way our parents started and finished with the Times, Telegraph or whatever.
Facebook is already the leading source of human-filtered news, but such sources are still tiny (5%) compared to the general search engines and portals (95%). Facebook’s extraordinary reach (400m users) and comprehensiveness (young users live in it) could change that.
Try it in Facebook
- search for a news outlet such as NY Times or Guardian, or bloggers such as Guido Fawkes
- click ‘Become a fan’ for them
- go to your Home page
- under the left-hand news feed links, click ‘More’ then ‘Create new list’
- call it ‘News’ and add the news sources you’re a fan of
- to add more sources later, click the edit pencil by your News feed’s link and repeat
It’s not that fluid a process yet – but Facebook only suggested this use last week.
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