

Wising Up to Facebook - jeffreyfox
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/opinion/wising-up-to-facebook.html

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keithgibson
A rather lazy piece, in my opinion. It doesn't deliver any new or critical
analysis of Facebook or anything to do with it. Rather, it simply compiles
previous articles written about the social network into a single, pessimistic
piece. It's a lame literature review. edit:typo

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sc68cal
Keller has a history of writing lazy and out-of-touch columns.

Salon put him at #11 on their Hack List.
<http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/11_bill_keller/>

_He’s got a bland style coupled with a smug voice, and absolutely no original
thoughts on the major issues of the day. When Times Magazine editor Hugo
Lindgren hired Keller to pen a front-of-the-book column, it was perhaps
supposed to be full of banal lessons from his old days in the field, but it
very quickly became “obtuse old man yells at cloud computing.”_

Don't forget - he also was a supporter of the Iraq War and attempted to
rationalize his support of it:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/us/sept-11-reckoning/kelle...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/us/sept-11-reckoning/keller.html)

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DanielBMarkham
_Every company, of course, protects its interests in the places where laws are
made and adjudicated, so in hiring its corps of Washington insiders and
dispensing cash from its political action committee, Facebook is just joining
the mainstream. But Facebook’s way of friending the powerful is original. It
ingratiates itself with members of Congress by sending helpers to maximize the
constituent-pleasing, re-election-securing power of their Facebook pages. “If
you want to have long-term influence, there’s nothing better than having
politicians dependent on your product,” one envious Silicon Valley executive
told me._

Amazing. This would be like Google sending out employees to politicians
helping them get their political talking points ranking as #1 on certain
critical Google searches.

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jonnathanson
For what it's worth, Facebook does the same thing with big corporations that
pay it millions of dollars for year-long advertising deals (from which GM
famously pulled out in recent months). As far as I can tell, paying them a
giant chunk of cash gets you a dedicated sales team that occasionally visits
your office, helps you acquire "Likes" for your page, and tries its best to
explain how to maximize uptake of your posts via the context algorithm.

Seems a heck of a lot cheaper just to churn out relevant and high-quality
content instead, but what do I know? I realize I'm being fairly glib here, but
your hypothetical analogy about Google is pretty spot-on. Google didn't need
to hire a swarm of sales reps to explain SEO to advertisers; instead, it made
search _advertising_ fairly turnkey. It realized, rather astutely, that it was
better served owning the market for search advertising than wasting its
efforts hand-holding big clients on SEO. (Furthermore, it realized that
getting into the SEO business would necessarily conflict with its stated
desire to deliver the best results to users). And so it ceded one monetizable
space for another. Facebook might want to consider this choice.

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stantonk
I'm not old enough to know for sure, but I'm pretty certain people said the
same thing about the Internet, Rock & Roll, TV, Radio, and the Telephone. Meh.

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localhost3000
it's not a new point but it's a good one: for most teenagers the least 'cool'
people in the world are their parents. if the parents are really into facebook
the kids are going to be turned off and looking around for something else.

