Here are two quotes that got me thinking about what would happen if Facebook–whose user base is inexorably marching toward 400 million–ever got serious about the news aggregation business.
First, perpetual apple-cart-upsetter Mark Cuban got everyone’s hackles raised this week by taking aim at online sites that aggregate news from other sources, most especially Google (GOOG).
Among other colorful things he said during a keynote speech:
“Google is a vampire, and you run scared. There is no reason to be indexed in Google…You haven’t gotten anything back except that you’ve turned into zombies…You’ve got to realize they’re vampires and you can’t be the dumb blonde showing your neck.”
Then, yesterday, in a fourth-quarter earnings call, AOL (AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong, answering a question about the renewal status of its search deal with Google, talked about how other outlets, especially Facebook, were now more important than ever to getting traffic for his company’s content.
“Our strategy on distribution is not relying on search,” said Armstrong. “Fragmentation is our friend.”
It was a curious way of putting it, but the message was clear and correct–it will be increasingly obvious that consumers will inevitably move away from the only-search paradigm to that of discovery through social and other jacked-up affiliation networks.
Of course, that puts a site like Facebook in a catbird’s seat, given vast seas of rich data flow through it all the time.
At any given moment, its users are trading bazillions of links to articles, blogs, videos, photo images and more, pointing the way out to their friends in a giant did-you-see-this mosh pit.
While it’s dispersed widely all over the social networking service–on the Wall, on fan pages, in email, in comments–one has to wonder what would happen if Facebook ever decided to start corralling the information using some kind of aggregation method.
Could it pick the most linked and emailed stories of the day? Could it select the most popular photos? Could it tell you accurately what its little slice of humanity was buzzing about on a minute-by-minute basis?
Of course it could, but as more of a new sparkly “Twilight” vampire than the old-time scary one Cuban was describing.
Not that it will. I once queried Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg about the idea that Facebook could make some sort of newfangled competitor to the still-powerful Yahoo (YHOO) News.
She said no pretty flatly, noting that the whole service was about people sharing all kinds of news and information with their friends already.
But, it is clear to me, that–much as Google moved into the automated new business–Facebook could do the same anytime it wanted and create what would probably be one of the top aggregation sites for any kind of topic on the Web.
The Silicon Valley phenom certainly could not be easily as de-indexed as Google could be by worried media companies, as the skeins of information are so enmeshed that separating them is impossible. And why would you?
In his speech, Cuban urged traditional media creators to stop the aggregation madness.
“Show some balls,” he said. “If you turn your neck to a vampire, they are [going to] bite. But at some point the vampires run out of people’s blood to suck.”
In a deeply socially connected world though, it’s a very different story. And, in that world, vampires really do live forever.
Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.
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