What do Facebook’s “new breed of apps” mean for publishers?
14 Oct, 11 | by BMJ
The Guardian and Independent recently became the first UK newspapers to launch new style Facebook apps. These are a “new class of apps”, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and “have the ability not only to change the way we think about news but have the ability to change the way the whole news industry works”. They encourage “frictionless experiences”, where users opt in once and avoid being repeatedly asked to agree to allow their friends to see which articles they are reading, enabling “realtime serendipity”, as Zuckerberg put it.
“As we worked with different news organisations there were two camps: people that wanted to bring the social experience onto their sites, like Yahoo [News] and the Independent; and those that wanted the social news experience on Facebook, like Guardian, the Washington Post and the Daily,” director of Facebook’s platform partnerships Christian Hernandez stated. more…
Digg is the most popular example of a social news website and it’s probably the most well known as well. It initially started as a community with a strong technological focus, before expanding its topics to include politics, science and other types of news. Other popular social news websites which cover a wide range of topics include Reddit and Mixx. Examples of social news websites with a more narrow focus include Showhype (entertainment) and Sphinn (Internet marketing/SEO).
