Posts tagged ‘Facebook’

  • 08 Jul 2010 at 1:46 PM

The Squid and the Fail: What’s Wrong ‘The Social Network”s Trailer

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I’m necessarily fascinated by Facebook. I adore the movies of David Fincher. I can tolerate Aaron Sorkin’s schtickiness. Jesse Eisenberg did young neurotic well in “The Squid and the Whale.”

So why am I not excited about “The Social Network,” the forthcoming fil-um about the shady-to-the-max early days of the social network?

Probably because the most recent trailer, the second so far, makes it looks like the movie will be an uber-serious, talky-to-a-fault snoozefest investigation into whether Mark Zuckerberg snatched the idea for Facebook from its original founders. I’m envsioning “Zodiac,” another Fincher effort, also uber-serious and talky but not necessarily too long, adapted for a maybe-maybe not-maybe-ok probably theft of intellectual property.

The trailer, while nicely produced, feels off tonally.

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Is the FCC’s Consideration of Media Ownership Laws a Waste of Time?

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When I first started writing about media seven years ago, the biggest public-policy question was this: How many media outlets should one company be allowed to own in a given market? In those pre-Google IPO, pre-Facebook days, there was a very real concern that big, publicly-owned media companies, like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. or Clear Channel with thousands of outlets were wielding too much influence over the minds of Americans. Hence, the then-Republican-led FCC’s attempts to relax rules governing media concentration was met with legal opposition persistent enough that it’s still raging today, even as the FCC once again considers those laws.

Today things on the media scene couldn’t be more different. We might still fear the craggy visage of Rupert Murdoch using his newspaper and TV empire to spread his conservative agenda, but there’s probably more reason to worry about the babyfaced Mark Zuckerberg and what he’ll do with your data. If past worries were founded on the idea that a town’s media could essentially be owned by one family, now it’s that all the information you share online will be used in some way you don’t want. For big, old media companies, the period of geography-based expansion — the snapping up of local newspapers and TV and radio stations — is over. Now it’s all about who owns what digital platform.

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Some Suggested Taglines for MySpace’s New Ad Campaign

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Tom Anderson MySpaceAd Age has the scoop that MySpace is poking — hahahaha- wrong network — around for an ad agency to do a branding blitz in support of it oh-so-hotly anticipated relaunch. The News Corp.-owned property has been getting pounded by Facebook, even with its big-time PR screw-ups. Global users, according to Ad Age, has dropped from 127 million to 111 million between April 2009 and April 2010. Facebook has about half a billion.

As a way to stop the bleeding, MySpace is getting its functionality changed out to become more friendly to content producers, musicians, gamers, advertisers… in other words, everyone because… the user experience is horrifying. With it, comes a brand overhaul. Write Rupal Parekh and Michael Learmonth, “Industry executives say the News Corp.-owned company recently put out a request for proposals to several creative shops, asking them to help MySpace get the word out about the relaunch, which will include new features to be introduced in stages starting this summer and a revamped site and logo in the fall.”

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The Big Lesson From the Facebook Flap: The Digital Ad Business Needs to Regulate Itself

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If you were Mark Zuckerberg today, you’d be forgiven for extending your Memorial Day vacation an extra 24 hours and do whatever it is you would do for fun if you were Mark Zuckerberg

Weeks of getting pounded in the media over your company’s approach to privacy had amounted to nothing more a particularly pesky meme that, finally, seems to have run out of steam. Quit Facebook Day came and went, with just over 34,000 announcing their decisions to sign off of the social network. That represents .0000755556 of Facebook’s total user base of 450 million. Surely many more have deactivated their accounts recently, albeit without any public declaration, and it’s a bit arbitrary to call the game for Facebook just because a gimmicky event didn’t result in a user hemorrhage of MySpaceian proportions. But it’s pretty certain that Zuckerberg and company, despite some dubious decision-making and awful PR, have faced down their biggest challenge and won.

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An Imaginary(ish) Conversation Between Carol Bartz and Mark Zuckerberg

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Yesterday was a big day, PR-wise, for Mark Zuckerberg and Carol Bartz. Zuck used the austere pages of the Washington Post to soothe concerns about Facebook’s will to invade privacy, while Bartz showed up on stage at a TechCrunch conference to defend Yahoo against one of its loudest critics, TechCrunch founder, Michael Arrington. Both CEOs displayed their usual communication approaches–hers a defensive and blowsy vulgarity and his near-fatal boredom.

What follows is an imaginary conversation based on actual quotes from a video account and the op-ed.

Mark Zuckerberg: Six years ago, we built Facebook around a few simple ideas.

Carol Bartz: There’s no single strategy at Yahoo.

Zuckerberg: People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more. If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that’s more open and connected is a better world. These are still our core principles today.

Bartz: Yahoo is a company that is very, very strong in content. It’s moving towards the web of one…. People come to check the things they like. You can just get it together… Yahoo is one site people always stop at.

Zuckerberg: Facebook has been growing quickly. It has become a community of more than 400 million people in just a few years.

Bartz: If that’s all you’ve got, you better quit now.

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  • 17 May 2010 at 11:37 AM

The Facebook Exodus Will be Small — And Very Canadian

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When May 31 rolls around, I’ll do what I do on the last day of every other month: Pay my rent and some other bills, go to work and come home. What I won’t be doing is quitting Facebook, despite the best efforts of some to turn the day into a mass rejection of the social network.

Facebook PrivacySince Facebook rolled out yet another round of changes to its privacy settings earlier this year, the platform has been the subject of fierce criticism from an especially noisy core of early tech adopters. They’ve been hammering at Facebook’s arrogance on their blogs and in interviews and some internet celebrities, like Google’s Matt Cutts and Engadget founder Peter Rojas, have left the platform altogether. Quitting has become a sort of meme in and of itself, aided by the same buzz factor that has made Facebook a global hit in the first place.

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The Best Recent Writing (and Ranting) About the Media Business

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The media business, you may have heard somewhere, is in upheaval. Anyone with a stake in the production of content needs smart dissection of business models, careful parsing of data and, of course, pointed investigations that cut through the hype that always accompanies technological change. Too bad strong acts of journalism are few and far between, with most media writers chasing their own tails.

There have, however, been a few standout pieces of reportage and analysis of late, a few of which we’ve assembled below for your convenience.
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  • 07 May 2010 at 2:32 PM
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  • Privacy

The Varieties of Facebook Revolt

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Facebook has gone and done it again. Yet another round of changes has sparked a wave of revulsion that hasn’t been seen since, well, the last time Mark Zuckerberg altered the way you and your information are used by the massively popular social network. To an increasing number of people who think about the Internet, the harmless-sounding notion of the social graph has become little more than a trojan horse that will put all our personal data at risk.

On a personal level, I find it difficult to get terribly worked up about Facebook, and the constant tweaking of various parts of its user interface, privacy settings and so forth no longer perturbs me the way it once did. I don’t use it that often and, when I do, I operate with the understanding that having any semblance of privacy is just wishful thinking, if not downright delusion. Nevertheless, there’s been enough outcry that I think it helps to create a taxonomy. Herewith, four varieties of Facebook revolt.

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