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The Guardian’s Facebook Experience Explained
How does the Guardian get its news? One way to find out is to go and work with the company. In February, some Guardian colleagues and developers went to the US to work with Facebook. They quickly learned how to work on the social network’s team culture. Working with just four people in a room, they managed to get a lot done – and multiple projects. That culture was an incredible fit for the Guardian. It also explains how Facebook’s founders handle the newsroom’s massive workload.
Impact of frictionless sharing
The recent overhaul of Facebook has sparked many reactions, centered around the problem of ubiquitous sharing. Jessica Guynn, Somini Sengupta, and Farhad Manjoo each wrote about how frictionless sharing could cause users to be overly vulnerable to tracking. The social media giant has taken steps to combat the problems associated with frictionless sharing. Here are the three biggest concerns:
Frictionless sharing has become a ‘feature’ in Facebook that eliminates the need for users to manually share information. Although Facebook tries to keep frictionless sharing in a dark place, the News Ticker is the most prominent place to see it. Users can choose which updates to share by choosing to share them with others. This means that frictionless sharing increases noise in Facebook. Furthermore, frictionless sharing may lead to more data being collected by companies, governments, and third-party applications. While this may be helpful in some cases, this trend will ultimately lead to a proliferation of unnecessary data collection and privacy concerns.
Frictionless sharing does have its limitations. It’s easy to share too much information. Frictionless sharing might lead to a flood of news feeds. People might not be able to control frictionless sharing. And the Guardian may not want this to happen, so they’ve dropped the feature. It is important to note that frictionless sharing is opt-in, which means users have to turn each application on individually.
Impact of Instant Articles
The launch of Facebook Instant Articles on mobile devices comes nine months after the social networking platform launched its own content format. They are essentially web articles that are automatically picked up by the Facebook algorithm. The articles are essentially covered with a rich cover image and slide over to reveal the hosted content. The Facebook team claims that Instant Articles load ten times faster than mobile web and can be read in a quarter of a second.
The new format is faster than Facebook’s traditional link-based pages, which is beneficial for both publishers and readers. The new format also allows for better engagement as readers stay within the Facebook app instead of being transferred to the publisher’s own site. In addition to delivering more relevant content to Facebook users, publishers can also better monetize Instant Articles and control reader data. While The Guardian is under pressure to reduce its costs, and is pushing for a paid subscription program, the company needs to prioritize driving readers back to its own website to earn revenue through advertising and donations.
Impact of Apple News
The Guardian has withdrawn content from both Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles. The reason behind the decision is not yet clear, but the publication is clearly dissatisfied with these platform-publishing initiatives. While the company is pushing the idea of a paying membership system for its content, many publishers are unhappy with the money they are receiving from IA pages. The Guardian is not alone in cooling on Instant Articles. Other publishers, including BBC News, The New York Times, and National Geographic have already pulled content from the service.
The Guardian believes Apple’s news service is a boon for its audience, but the company’s failure to deliver a consistent experience to users may be a problem. Apple has made a mistake by limiting news in its Facebook widget to those sources. This is a sign that Apple is aiming to differentiate itself from competing news services. While many publishers remain on IA, the lack of marquee publishers may encourage other publishers to look at where their interests intersect with those of Facebook users.
Impact of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages
As Facebook and Google continue to battle it out over user attention and mobile traffic, Google has introduced an algorithm called AMP. It allows web pages to be lighter in weight by pre-loading them before a user clicks on them. In theory, this will mean a page will take just milliseconds to load, which is great news for consumers. AMP will also eliminate the need for JavaScript, which is often the culprit for slow page load times.
It will be interesting to see how long people will stay on AMP, especially with the recent announcement by Google. Facebook is among the competitors with “walled gardens,” which prevent users from consuming content without a subscription. It has its own fast lane for news content, called Instant Articles. These stripped-down pages load quicker and are embedded within the world’s largest social network.
