Wising Up to Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Wising Up to Facebook

nytimes.com

25 pointsjeffreyfox6 comments

A rather lazy piece, in my opinion. It doesn't deliver any new or critical analysis of Facebook or anything to do with it. Rather, it simply compiles previous articles written about the social network into a single, pessimistic piece. It's a lame literature review. edit:typo

Keller has a history of writing lazy and out-of-touch columns.

Salon put him at #11 on their Hack List. http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/11_bill_keller/

He’s got a bland style coupled with a smug voice, and absolutely no original thoughts on the major issues of the day. When Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren hired Keller to pen a front-of-the-book column, it was perhaps supposed to be full of banal lessons from his old days in the field, but it very quickly became “obtuse old man yells at cloud computing.”

Don't forget - he also was a supporter of the Iraq War and attempted to rationalize his support of it: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/us/sept-11-reckoning/kelle...

Every company, of course, protects its interests in the places where laws are made and adjudicated, so in hiring its corps of Washington insiders and dispensing cash from its political action committee, Facebook is just joining the mainstream. But Facebook’s way of friending the powerful is original. It ingratiates itself with members of Congress by sending helpers to maximize the constituent-pleasing, re-election-securing power of their Facebook pages. “If you want to have long-term influence, there’s nothing better than having politicians dependent on your product,” one envious Silicon Valley executive told me.

Amazing. This would be like Google sending out employees to politicians helping them get their political talking points ranking as #1 on certain critical Google searches.

For what it's worth, Facebook does the same thing with big corporations that pay it millions of dollars for year-long advertising deals (from which GM famously pulled out in recent months). As far as I can tell, paying them a giant chunk of cash gets you a dedicated sales team that occasionally visits your office, helps you acquire "Likes" for your page, and tries its best to explain how to maximize uptake of your posts via the context algorithm.

Seems a heck of a lot cheaper just to churn out relevant and high-quality content instead, but what do I know? I realize I'm being fairly glib here, but your hypothetical analogy about Google is pretty spot-on. Google didn't need to hire a swarm of sales reps to explain SEO to advertisers; instead, it made search advertising fairly turnkey. It realized, rather astutely, that it was better served owning the market for search advertising than wasting its efforts hand-holding big clients on SEO. (Furthermore, it realized that getting into the SEO business would necessarily conflict with its stated desire to deliver the best results to users). And so it ceded one monetizable space for another. Facebook might want to consider this choice.

I'm not old enough to know for sure, but I'm pretty certain people said the same thing about the Internet, Rock & Roll, TV, Radio, and the Telephone. Meh.

it's not a new point but it's a good one: for most teenagers the least 'cool' people in the world are their parents. if the parents are really into facebook the kids are going to be turned off and looking around for something else.

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