A Contribution to the Great Debate

The irresistable march of Facebook continues… Within a few years they’ll probably shut the rest of existence down as there will be nothing worth doing that you can’t do in Facebook.

But that poses an interesting question. What should we do about it in Channel 4 News? With most fads - Digg, Del.icio.us, etc - I’ve generally been of the opinion that the way to get the best out of them is just to produce really good interesting stuff and hope the users of Digg, Del.icio.us and so like it enough to share it through their platform of choice.

It was tempting at first to go around adding ‘Digg this’ buttons to everything, just to let people know that we were aware that these things existed, or to seed stuff onto Digg in the hope that the Diggers would dig it themselves. But I don’t think the rewards justified the effort. The number one referrer will always be Google, and this newfangled stuff is just a rounding error in comparison. Technorati in particular seems to be a massive waste of space and time.

So - what to do with Facebook? Use it to organise my personal parties and share photos, and otherwise ignore it? One or two correspondents have been using it, and I think there’s some kind of ‘We love Channel 4 News’ group going somewhere. But the web team hasn’t done very much about it.

Having been firmly against it for a long time, I was starting to think should we develop some cunning new Facebook app for Channel 4 News. Something that shared video, and maybe allowed people to comment on it or something.

But then I read this. Basically, everyone hates facebook apps. In fact, this lunchbreak I went through deleting a number of invitations to install apps that let me become a zombie and run round biting people. Or suchlike.

So - I think Facebook goes back in the bucket marked ‘fads to benignly ignore’.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Technorati