A redesign of its blog-like Notes tool, which lets you post longer updates with photos to your friends, is now rolling out... the first time Notes has been updated in years. It now has a design that will look familiar to anyone who has ever read a post on Medium, - Facebook begins rolling out Medium-like redesign of Notes | The Verge

Get with the community; The death and rebirth of comments: The death of the open web?

It’s easy to underestimate how much of the media you’ve consumed was shaped by the “like” button... whispers suggest that the company is not, in fact, launching a simple “dislike” button, but something that conveys empathy.... it’s safe to say there will be consequences... When Facebook broadens the scope of the emotional-response buttons, t…

Facebook... have, as I speculated earlier, built their system around RSS. This means there can be interop between all the big companies --Twitter, Google, Apple, Facebook -- now building new news systems... No publishing silos. Let news flow where it wants to. And let competitors arise who may do more interesting and useful things with news tha…

...with iOS 9 and content blockers, what you're seeing is Apple's attempt to fully drive the knife into Google's revenue platform.... So it's Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook, all with their own revenue platforms. Google has the web, Facebook has its app, and Apple has the iPhone. This is the newest and biggest war in tech going today. And the …

Blogging has never been easier but getting read has never been harder... The problem isn't freedom or openness but distribution... you might post it on Facebook or Google Plus. Your friends might see it ... (though this is largely random) and they might share it ... You might post it on LinkedIn and your network might see it ... and LinkedIn migh…

Facebook seems to be giving Notes a reboot... looks like nothing else on the website: It has a clean, white-space-filled design with extravagantly readable type. It looks, in other words, like Medium. - Facebook, Medium, and the Personal Press Release - The Atlantic

"sometimes organizations get so caught up in showing off their use of social media tools that they forget that those tools have a purpose – strengthening the relationship between an individual and your organization. A healthy social strategy includes both content created to get new folks in the engagement funnel AND to strengthen the “passion-c…

One of the best longreads re: the future of news media I've read in a while: "Websites... have been able to accumulate enormous audiences with incredible speed by harvesting referrals from social networks... Websites plausibly marketed these people as members of their audiences, rather than temporarily diverted members of a platform’s audience.…

Every brand, every company, and every person has a story to tell, and visual storytelling is a very effective way of sharing your brand’s message and engaging with your customers. - The Science of Storytelling Through Facebook Images

The last couple of years has seen a revival of the Art of the eNewsletter. I have found myself paying much more attention to enewsletters in my Inbox... than to the marketing junk gushing from social media

"AOL's online dominance was such that building sites for the traditional web became secondary ... Companies fought over who had the best relationship with AOL, thereby allowing them access to audiences that their competitors didn't have.... If you're starting to think that 1995 AOL sounds a lot like 2015 Facebook, you'd be right. 20 years late…

The reasons are simple but powerful: you can’t control the communication. Despite it being a communication channel/social network (emphasis on network)/community (very debatable), it points into the other direction: filtering information, needing to pay for content to be seen, very distracting by other things like games, Ads (which used to be cont…

Why does one “experiment” (i.e., introducing a new product) fail to raise ethical concerns, whereas a true scientific experiment (i.e., introducing a variation of the product to determine the comparative safety or efficacy of the original) sets off ethical alarms? - Please, Corporations, Experiment on Us - The New York Times

I've broken down all of the major algorithm changes that have occurred over the past 2 years... - The Ultimate Guide to Facebook News Feed Changes... and How They Impact YOU!

“In fact, the very point was to get them, and these comments, off my pages,” - After deciding to charge for comments, Tablet’s conversation moves…to Facebook » Nieman Journalism Lab

I’ve had the amazing pleasure of meeting with over a dozen of the largest companies on the planet over the last six months... [who] have hired journalists, producers, broadcasters, and editors to refine and tell their story on a consistent basis... but not one ... focused on subscriber growth... While larger enterprises are fighting silo battle…

"...after this Spring’s most recent NewsFeed algorithm updates is that Facebook Pages—the ones used by businesses—are generating appalling user engagement rates... work-arounds ... mostly involve investing even more resources into Facebook ... more money devoted to advertising to fans brands have already paid to acquire in the first place." …

"Now we in journalism get to stand back and see technology titans jump over each other to bring benefits to news. But we’d best not stand back too far. We journalists and publishers must collaborate with the platforms as we demand that they collaborate with us. And as they teach us about technology, we must teach them about journalism." - Playi…

the social network will share analytics, and Instant Articles is compatible with audience measurement and attribution tools... won't receive preferential treatment from Facebook's News Feed sorting algorithm... Facebook will parse HTML and RSS to display articles with fonts, layouts, and formats ... also providing vivid media options like embe…

"usually, researchers are at a pains to highlight their findings. This one buries them as deep as it could, using a mix of convoluted language and irrelevant comparisons... this study is not about all of Facebook users, despite language ... that’s quite misleading: “Finally, we conclusively establish that on average in the context of Facebook…”…

Great takedown of the flaws and bad framing of the Facebook filter bubble study in Science: "Alarm bells are ringing for me. The tobacco industry might once have funded a study that says that smoking is less dangerous than coal mining, but here we have a study about coal miners smoking... the article’s strange comparison between “individual…

FiltreBubble author on Facebook's study in Science: "Facebook’s data science team has put part of the “filter bubble” theory to the test ... Upshot: here is a real and scientifically significant “filter bubble effect” — the Facebook news feed algorithm in particular will tend to amplify news that your political compadres favor... For self-de…

Google, eight major publishers across Europe, and a couple of trade organizations are forming a partnership ... an alliance born out of desperation on the part of publishers and opportunity on the part of technology companies... the largest news and information companies in the world will be formed out of a hybrid of these current entities... …

"Now Sandberg is skewing younger. On Friday, Facebook announced a partnership with LinkedIn, LeanIn.org and the Anita Borg Institute to form Circles aimed at women studying computer science or engineering."

"the most crucial element of Facebook’s new power: the right to chose between the free expression of ideas or to instead impose censorship when it deems content unworthy... How will its algorithms handle stories posted directly to Facebook that question Facebook’s monopoly status? ... If the Washington Post posted its PRISM story about collusion …

"In an increasingly crowded news feed, Facebook’s algorithm updates can make it tough for brands to get much notice.... We’ve been scouring the web to find ... all the tactics, new additions and post types you need to know today."

"Facebook is ... aiming to be the Internet equivalent of a broadband provider — providing the means by which all media is published and accessed. Here’s what brands and publishers need to know ... - Facebook urging publishers to post their articles and videos directly to Facebook... - For publishers that use Facebook for their comments sections,…

"Skeptics are howling that this is a Faustian bargain—that the media are mortgaging their long-term futures for short-term gain... Facebook has presented the news media with a collective-action problem. News sites aren’t blind.... if they could all get together and decide, as a group, what to do about Facebook, no doubt they’d think long and hard…

"The problem is that Facebook controls what you see and when. If it becomes the primary way to consume news and watch videos, what happens when a news story is controversial about the company itself? Or isn’t within its content guidelines (like pornography)? You’ll be receiving a filtered version of the internet that’s controlled by one company."