Disruptive Conversations

Will Facebook's impending opening up of its "Instant Articles" on April 12 to ALL publishers of content help the "open web"? Or will it just keep more people inside of Facebook's shiny walled garden?

As Facebook's launch announcement says in part:

We built Instant Articles to solve a specific problem—slow loading times on the mobile web created a problematic experience for people reading news on their phones. This is a problem that impacts publishers of all sizes, especially those with audiences where low connectivity is an issue.

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Facebook’s goal is to connect people to the stories, posts, videos or photos that matter most to them. Opening up Instant Articles will allow any publisher to tell great stories, that load quickly, to people all over the world. With Instant Articles, they can do this while retaining control over the experience, their ads and their data.

It sounds great on many levels and blogging pioneer Dave Winer has written passionately about "How Instant Articles helps the open web" (also published on Medium). He went on to document his Instant Articles (IA) feed and to talk about how his blog posts now automagically stream out to Facebook Instant Articles along with other services: Oh the places this post will go!

The beautiful part about Instant Articles is that it is based on good old RSS feeds ... and so with a few additions to the markup of your RSS feed you could be ready to go technically to start publishing Instant Articles. (There are a number of other steps you need to do, though.) Even better, and a point Dave definitely makes, Facebook Instant Articles will update when you make changes to your original text - something that doesn't happen with services (such as Medium) where you can syndicate your articles after you write them... but they don't update.

As Dave notes in "How IA happened from my point of view" by quoting me (in my comment left on Medium), I think this a great step in allowing publishers to easily get their content into Facebook's Instant Articles. My quote said:

"I have expected that Facebook would be focused on keeping everyone inside their shiny walled garden and thought I understood that Instant Articles involved putting your content on FB’s servers… which I now understand it *does*, but via caching of an RSS feed. Which is VERY cool!"

In my previous quick reading about Instant Articles, I had understood that it involved publishers loading their content onto Facebook's servers - and so I thought that we who publish would be forced to load our content onto FB's servers separate from our own websites.

In other words, I thought we would need to publish twice.

This, to me, would NOT support the "open web" that exists outside the big walled gardens of content that we are seeing now evolving.

I thank Dave for helping me understand that Facebook very nicely chose to base IA on the consumption of RSS feeds. This allows us as publishers to create our content once and syndicate it out to Facebook Instant Articles.

This is good and very much in line with the IndieWeb thinking around "POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere" that I very much believe in. I applaud Facebook for making it so easy for content publishers to make our content available as Instant Articles.

BUT...

Is the existence of Instant Articles good for the open web?

Right now, when I post a link in Facebook to an article on one of my sites:

when people follow that link they view the article on MY site.

On MY web server, running somewhere out on the distributed, de-centralized and "open" web.

(Which, yes, is increasingly getting centralized in terms of content hosting providers, but let's leave that for a separate article. The point is that I currently do have multiple choices for where I host that content.)

People can interact with my site, see my content there, potentially leave comments there on the site, etc.

My site, and the content on that site, is not dependent on Facebook.

The key point about viewing Instant Articles is:

Reading "Instant Articles" keeps you ENTIRELY within Facebook's walled garden.

You read the Instant Articles inside of your Facbook mobile app. You comment and interact with the article inside of Facebook's app.

All the interaction happens within Facebook's mobile app.

Yes, as a publisher I can get analytics about my content, including via other services such as Google Analytics.

And yes, all the Instant Articles content is pulled in from my website out on the "open web". But while that content is pulled in using "open protocols",

the content is cached (stored) on Facebook's servers and made available through Facebook's own networks.

Over time publishers might start to ask:

Why not simply publish everything DIRECTLY inside of Facebook?

With Instant Articles, Facebook is already serving out my content from their servers... why don't I simplify my workflow even more by just publishing all my content natively inside of Facebook?

And if I were Facebook that would be what I would ultimately want. Even more content exclusively inside MY walled garden that would keep people staying inside those shiny walls.

Yes, User Experience Matters

Having said all of this, I do understand WHY Facebook is doing this beyond the obvious desire to keep people in their walled garden:

The mobile user experience of reading/viewing content has a HUGE need for improvement!

Even with the push by Google and many others to make the web "mobile-friendly" there is still a huge amount of room for improvement.

We need to speed up the "mobile web" and to improve the user experience.

Facebook is trying to do this with Instant Articles. Google is trying to do this with "Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)", which I'll be soon writing an article about. Apple would like to do this with Apple News.

All of those efforts, though, do speed up the mobile web ... but only for users of specific apps / browsers / etc.. Each of the efforts creates a better mobile user experience, but within their own walled gardens.

And I do understand that from Facebook's point of view the mobile user experience isn't as seamless as it could be when people are in the Facebook app and then follow a link out to a completely different look-and-feel and a completely different user experience.

It can be jarring. And it may not work all that well.

Instant Articles will bring a significantly better user experience to users of the Facebook mobile apps.

As a user of those Facebook apps, I can see that being a good thing. Admittedly I sometimes do not follow links I see in my NewsFeed because I know from experience that the site linked to loads slowly and I don't have time at that moment to wait to view that article. I want to see it NOW.

But is the price of a better user experience worth the continued centralization of content within large walled gardens?

And will anyone really care... as long as they can read their article as fast as possible?

Will I Publish Through Facebook Instant Articles?

Of course!

I'm not stupid! The reality is that right now a huge amount of the audience I want to reach is within Facebook's shiny walled garden - and uses Facebook's NewsFeed as a primary way of getting much of their content. I am there myself and do get a large number of links that I visit on a daily basis through what I see in my Facebook NewsFeed.

Like Dave Winer already does, I'm working to see what I can do to make at least a few of my sites accessible via Instant Articles by the April 12 launch. (For instance, I see WordPress plugins for IA already emerging and FB themselves provides some guidance for content management systems.)

I'll do it because my end goal is to get my content seen by the people who I want to reach.

And right now, Facebook is the way that so many people consume content.

I have to go where the conversation is happening.

Do I worry, though, about the long-term effects this may have on the "open web"?

Absolutely.

And I think you should, too.

We Need An Open Internet

We need an "open web" ... and a far larger "open Internet" ... where we don't have to ask permission to communicate, connect, collaborate and create (what many of us call "permissionless innovation").

The centralization of content, both in terms of publishing of content and consumption of content, is a very worrisome trend.

Huge, centralized walled gardens such as Facebook today can make Instant Articles "open to everyone" ... but tomorrow they could start to play much more of the "gatekeeper" role, determining:

• precisely "who" gets to publish content to the Facebook audience (which they are already doing in a way through the process of applying for Instant Article access);
• whether that content gets to be seen by all Facebook users (which they are already doing with the NewsFeed algorithm and could do even more now that Facebook Reactions are out);
• whether that content gets to be seen for free - or for a price (which they are already doing with the NewsFeed algorithm for displaying Pages content and letting you "boost" content).

Yes, I'll publish through Facebook Instant Articles (assuming my feeds get approved) because it will help Facebook users more easily view my content.

And I'm glad that Facebook chose to use RSS as the base to allow us to easily publish our content as Instant Articles without having to create a separate mechanism for publishing to Facebook.

I just worry that in then end this will only help keep more people inside of Facebook's shiny and pretty walled garden ... versus interacting with the many other sites and services that make up the larger open Internet.

What do you think?

Will you start publishing your content as Facebook Instant Articles? Do you think that we as content providers have much of a choice if we want to reach people on Facebook? What do you think this will do long-term?

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An audio podcast about Facebook Instant Articles is also available:

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UPDATE #1 - In a bit of synchronicity, Dave Winer published a new post - Who should support IA and how - at about the same time as I posted mine. He suggests that IA should be used as essentially the improved plumbing to make the mobile user experience better across different platforms and walled gardens. I don't disagree.. but I wonder how many of the other walled gardens (ex. Twitter, Medium) would actually support Facebook's protocol. (Sounds like a topic for another blog post...)

After using Facebook Reactions for two days now (after writing about it on Wednesday), I find myself overall pleased with the ability to do more than just "Like" a post. Sure, I would like more "reactions" (most notably the ability to leave a "WTF" reaction to most current political posts!) but I also understand the need of the designers to limit the choices. (This Wired article had some good insight into the design challenges.)

But now I find myself wondering:

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1. Will this change DECREASE the number of text comments?

Previously because the only option was to "like" a post, if there was one that was sad (ex. death of a loved one or pet) I would often write something. Now there is the option to choose "Sad". Ditto for the other reactions.

2. Will this change INCREASE the number of interactions?

On the other hand, now you do have options when you don't want to "like" a post but just don't know what to say in words. Previously you might have NOT engaged with the post at all. Now you could choose a reaction as a way of interacting. As a friend wrote on Facebook:

now people who weren't going to take the time to write out a text comment anyway will be able to at least express something because they now have a choice other than just like or nothing.

3. Will Facebook share the Reactions data with Page administrators?

For Facebook Pages, when we go into the "Insights" area, will we be able to see the different "reactions" to a post? I suspect the answer is "yes", but on any of the Pages for which I am an administrator I haven't yet seen people using Reactions. (I imagine I'll be able to answer this myself in a little while as people use the reactions more.)

4. How well will the use of these reactions enable Facebook to target advertising?

Let's be clear, rolling out these reactions helps Facebook in a massive way with being able to better target you for advertising. If you previously "liked" a post about, oh, kale ... but in truth were only doing it because you liked that the person shared the post, Facebook might have interpreted that as support and showed you ads about kale.

Now you can choose "Angry" as a reaction to any article about kale, which Facebook could then use to NOT show you positive ads about kale, but perhaps instead ads for the "kale-haters" club or something like that.

(I should note that I can't recall ever actually clicking on an ad in Facebook, but maybe some day I will.)

5. Will Facebook use the Reactions information to tweak what is displayed in our NewsFeed?

For instance, if I use an Angry reaction for every political article about Donald Trump, will Facebook change my NewsFeed to show me fewer Trump articles? (But what if I like being angry?)

There seems like there could be a great possibility for manipulation of the NewsFeed and thus of people's emotions. (As Facebook did as a test back in 2012.)

6. Will Facebook provide information to the public about the use of Reactions?

Will Facebook ever provide some aggregate data about how people are using Reactions? For instance the number of posts with each reaction... or the percentages of usage of the different reactions?

Facebook obviously has the capacity to gather all this data on a truly massive scale. It would be great if at some point they could provide some views into what kind of usage they are seeing.

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Obviously question #3 I may soon be able to answer myself, but the others are ones that I'll continue to wonder about.

What about you? What do you think about Facebook Reactions? What questions do you have?

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An audio commentary on this topic is available:

Oh, my! Get ready for a major change in your Facebook NewsFeed TODAY as Facebook makes "Reactions" available globally. Now when you are in a desktop web browser and you hover your cursor over the "Like" link, you get a pop-up menu where you can choose a reaction other than to simply "like" a post:

Alerted to this by a post from the ever-watchful Christopher Penn on Facebook, I confirmed that Reactions also works in Facebook mobile apps. On the iOS app if you just quickly tap the "Like" button you will "like" that post as you always have done. But if you hold down your tap just a moment longer, you will get a pop-up menu:

After you have chosen one of these reactions, it will then appear at the bottom of the post in both an emoji form and in a text word visible to you:

As with a standard "Like" you can just tap the word to remove the reaction. If you do the longer tap you can change your reaction.

Now, on my iPhone, I had to kill off the Facebook app and re-launch it in order for the reactions to appear but once I did that it worked fine.

The six "reactions" are:

• Like
• Love
• Haha
• Wow
• Sad
• Angry

I expect we'll initially see a lot of playing around with these reactions as people experiment with the reactions, but longer term I do see a value in this increased range of reactions. For instance, there are certainly news posts being passed around right now that I want to indicate that I'm glad someone shared... but I certainly don't "like" the content of the news post.

Similarly when a tragic event happens in someone's life and I may not have the words to say in a comment, it hasn't felt right to "like" their post - this now gives an option of "Sad". Having said that... I can think of some posts that I "dislike" but that are not "sad" and don't rise to the level of me being "angry". My option there may be to continue to simply do nothing.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see what this does to our NewsFeeds over the next few days and over the weeks ahead.

What do you think? Do you like having the new "reactions"? Will you use them? Or do you think they are unnecessary? Will you just stick with the plain old "Like"?

And what "reaction" will you give this blog post when you see it on Facebook? ;-)

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UPDATE #1 - After a few hours of using Reactions, a couple of additional points.

1. Only for posts, not comments - the Reactions buttons appear only for the "Like" link for a post / status update / photo / etc. If you want to react to a comment you are still limited to "Like".

2. Notifications mention reactions - when you see pop-up notifications or look in your list of notifications, the new Reactions are displayed separately from the traditional Likes.

One thing to keep in mind, too, is that beyond helping you express yourself more, the Reactions also help Facebook in more accurately tracking what you think about NewsFeed items and therefore allowing them to more carefully target advertising to you.

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UPDATE #2 - A very large number of articles about Reactions up on Techmeme.

This article in Wired provides a good view into the design of the Reactions and the testing that wound up with the 6 reactions launched today.

The first step to successful writing or blogging is very simple...

write something!

Put words on the page or on the screen.

End the tyranny of the "blank page" or "blank screen".

Start... somewhere.

Write... something.

And then, in the case of blogging, hit the almighty "Publish" button and send your words out into the ether for others to find and consume.

I've been struggling with this a good bit myself lately. If you look at my danyork.me site and see the calendar on the right side for this month (Feb 2016), the dates in blue are when I have published blog posts or articles across any of the 12+ sites where I write. This includes the Internet Society main blog and Deploy360 site, where writing on those sites is part of my job.

It's pretty sparse for someone who claims to be a "writer".

There are a zillion excuses and explanations I can give, of course. I've been "too busy". I've been caught up in "planning" for future events and activities. I've been sucked into "research". I've been writing words for articles and posts that are published under other people's names. I've been very tired with some other activities going on. I just haven't had the time.

All of which are true. But all of which are irrelevant.

The truth is that we prioritize what is important to us... and there's always time in there for dashing off even a small post such as this one.

Yesterday I stumbled upon a recent post from Greg Ferro titled "Blogging Success Is Simply About Doing" where he writes this:

You can be guaranteed that nothing will happen if you publish nothing. I can guarantee that something will happen if you publish something.

Exactly.

The first step is to ... write something.

Today, this post is that "something" for me.

What will yours be?

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An audio commentary on this topic can be found in TDYR 289:

Yesterday my teenage daughter clued me in to something that Senator Bernie Sanders' campaign is doing that none of the other Democratic or Republican presidential candidates seem to be doing: advertising on Snapchat!

Once you take a photo in Snapchat, you have the option to swipe to the right to cycle through a series of "filters" that you can add to your photo before you send it to someone or post it to your "story" on Snapchat. These filters include things like your location, the time of day, the outside temperature and, interestingly, the speed in MPH you are currently traveling! (Along with a warning not to "snap and drive!)

One of those filters here in Keene, New Hampshire, (and I'm assuming this is active for all Snapchat users in New Hampshire) lets you add in an image about Bernie Sanders:

Once you've done that you can then make other changes to the photo before sending it on to another Snapchat user (or users) or posting it to your "Story". It also adds a "Bernie" campaign logo to the top of your image.

At first I was puzzled about whether this was an ad or something coming from Snapchat itself (which I thought would be bizarre) but then when I tried it myself I noticed that for a brief moment the word "SPONSORED" appears when you are applying the filter:

And of course when you look closer you see in the brown part on the bottom:

GEOFILTER PAID FOR BY BERNIE 2016 (not the billionaires)

... leaving no doubt that this was an ad from the campaign.

In playing more with the filters, I've seen no sign of ads from any other candidates.

It's quite clever in that yesterday it said "2 DAYS TO GO!" and today it says "1 DAY TO GO!" I'm going to guess that tomorrow there will be something about "today is the day".

Here's what the full image looks like when posted in Snapchat (the actual image is just of a street in downtown Keene ... but notice the Bernie logo on the top and the image on the bottom):

Presumably Snapchatters more creative than I am could take selfies or other photos that make better use of the Bernie filter. :-)

Kudos to the Sanders team for trying something like this. In this year's NH Presidential Primary, we've seen a HUGE amount of social media usage... but so far this is the first I've seen of Snapchat usage.

I would be curious to know, of course, if there are any stats to find out how many Snapchatters actually used the filter ... but I'm not sure how you ever would get that info. (Presumably Snapchat can deliver that info back to the ad purchaser, in this case the Sanders campaign.)

I suspect if this is successful we'll see more usage in the upcoming primaries. The use of "geofiltering" to restrict the filter availability is also intereseting as it allows the campaigns to limit their spending and also very specifically target their messages.

I should note that in order to use this filter, I had to turn on Location Services for Snapchat on my iPhone. I had not done so as I honestly don't use Snapchat all that much... but once I did I then had these filters.

Have any of you reading this seen Snapchat usage by other campaigns?

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UPDATE - 9 Feb 2016: And here's what the Snapchat filter looks like on Primary Day itself:

After experimenting with Facebook Live video last week, I encountered an interesting limit:

Regular users are LIMITED TO 30 MINUTES per live video stream.

When doing a Facebook Live stream this morning, I suddenly found I started getting warning messages at the 25-minute mark. I captured a few of them:

Naturally I had to let it run down to be out of time... at which point my iPad screen got all blurry:

and stayed that way for a minute or so when it seems the app or Facebook Live service must have been post-processing the video, because the next thing I saw was a screen telling me that my video was posted to my timeline:

And that was that.

Now... in Facebook's Best Practices for Facebook Live, they say (my emphasis added):

7. Broadcast for longer periods of time to reach more fans The longer you broadcast, the more likely fans are to discover and share your video with their friends on Facebook. We recommend that you go live for at least 5 minutes and we've seen some public figures broadcast for over an hour.

Presumably this longer time is for "verified" accounts and Pages.

Searching in Facebook Help, I found this page where down under "How do I share a live video to my Timeline on Facebook?" has this (my emphasis added):

During your broadcast, you'll see the number of live viewers, the names of friends who are watching and a real-time stream of comments. Your broadcast can be no longer than 30 minutes. When you end your broadcast, it'll be saved on your Timeline like any other video.

Now, in all honesty, I don't know that the type of videos I could see personally streaming live with Facebook Live would be longer than 30 minutes. In our days of "snackable video", i.e. it's kind of like a quick snack of food, you're generally looking for really short videos of a couple of minutes.

I could see this for quick "person-on-the-street" interviews... quick updates during events, etc. For all of that, the 30-minute limit is fine.

BUT...

... for companies or organizations (or public figures) who might want to live stream a presentation, workshop, talk, etc.... those events might go much longer.

I would assume the path to longer video would be to get your page or account "verified" (and I may have to try this now :-) ).