Must-Read:John Herrmann: Notes on the Surrender at Menlo Park
Must-Read: It used to be the bookstores collected order flow and then ordered books from distributors who ordered them from publishers who edited and printed them from manuscript by authors. Then Amazon appeared and is still seeking to eliminate as many intermediaries between authors and book readers as it can. Is Facebook about to try the same thing? And how long before reporters with followings start collecting their paychecks from Facebook directly? Interesting questions…
: Notes on the Surrender at Menlo Park: “Platforms grow by incorporating the labor of users and partners…
…they tend, over time, to regard the presence of the partners as an inefficiency. Twitter asks developers to make a bunch of apps using its data, so people make a bunch of mobile apps, then Twitter notices that these apps are actually very important to Twitter, and so Twitter buys one of the apps and takes steps to expel all the other apps…. [Facebook’s] publishers are app developers… working… to find ways to increase Facebook’s share of user attention and satisfaction. If they… succeed… Facebook will take note. Perhaps Facebook will then devise a way to compensate reporters, or content creators, directly, rather than through the publications they work for. Maybe they’ll just buy a publication! Or many publications…. A word of caution about Facebook is not a wish to return to some non-existent ideal time. Print media was broken, TV was broken, commercial and public radio were broken, local media was broken, web media was very broken…. Worrying about the details of the coming future is merely taking that future seriously. People who insist otherwise? They have their reasons…. One of the great triumphs of Silicon Valley is its success in framing its companies’ objectives as missions, and their successes as pure contributions to progress…