

Guardian kills its Facebook social reader, regains control over its content - mtgx
http://gigaom.com/2012/12/13/guardian-kills-its-facebook-social-reader-regains-control-over-its-content/

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vickytnz
Martin Belam (former head of UX at the Guardian, and designer of the app) has
a great commentary on its successes and failures:
[http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2012/12/guardian-
facebook-...](http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2012/12/guardian-facebook-
rise-fail.php)

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andrewcooke
thanks. would upvote again. more informative than anything else here.

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Irishsteve
Really didn't like the way I was required to indicate to my entire network
what articles I'm reading.

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k-mcgrady
That was the whole point of the social reader - integration with open graph.
Removing that and there was no reason for them to build it in the first place.
If you didn't want to share what you were reading automatically you could just
go to the regular website and use the regular sharing/like button. I was very
particular about which stories I viewed through it. It's surprising the
articles you read on a news site that you'd prefer not be shared.

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bonaldi
It's more than just privacy, it's about utility: there's a huge difference in
signal between an active recommendation for something from someone I trust,
and the firehose of seeing everything they click on. The latter just tells me
what headlines appeal to them, if that.

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rdl
Yeah, I was embarrassed whenever I'd click on a linkbait headline, get
disappointed, and then other people saw I'd fallen for it. There was no good
way to indicate "wow, this sucked" other than manually deleting it from my
newsfeed or adding a comment.

I ended up just blocking the social apps entirely. In general, I hate facebook
apps that exist on-facebook; I like the external use of the social graph by
some other sites.

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Crake
Whenever I'd try to visit a news link on facebook that one of my other friends
had read (and had it autopost to the timeline) it would always try to get ME
to sign up as well. I'm really suspicious of that stuff, so I always refused
it and either decided I didn't care about the article or used google to find
it on my own. I was always paranoid I'd click on some article that would
actually turn out to be, I don't know, the secret sex lives of snails or
something, and I'd be really embarrassed by it. (Why does a news application
need access to all my personal info, anyway? I'm not agreeing to that!!)

It's great to hear that newspapers are starting to reject it. I really hate
the idea of facebook becoming its own walled garden affair. Especially because
there's no way to tell wtf is ever going on it, it doesn't show me half of
what I want to see...so now I barely use it and have just left it up for party
invites and all the nontech people who act like you're asking them to get a
tooth extracted if you expect them to actually e-mail instead of sending a
fbook message :/

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rdl
I think I'm a "tech person" by most definitions, and I still like using fb
messages vs. email in a lot of cases. It's a great directory service (I still
don't have a good address book for mutt), shows presence (which is missing
from email), and the integrated-IM is even better than google (because it
doesn't end up sending messages to my desktop if I'm on my phone, etc.)

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Crake
Yeah, everyone's different, plus it depends a lot on the situation (short
message vs. long message, importance, is there an attachment, etc). Most of
the people I know who insist on facebook messages -only- are more the type
that can't figure out how to even open a zip file.

Also, a lot of people I know got hit in a round of account deletions and got
majorly screwed over because they were conducting all their freelance business
through fb messages (and then had no way to communicate with their clients,
since neither of them had each other's e-mail). Because of that, it just feels
more unsafe to me, like I could lose all my data at any time. Plus they keep
doing weird things like deciding what posts I want to see from my friends (I'd
like to see all of them by default?? if they are annoying then I will change
it), constantly resetting my news feed to "top stories!" and etc. I guess I
don't trust them not to mess up the messaging too and then maybe I'll miss a
message from someone about something that's really important.

I agree that it works fairly well as a directory. I wish there were something
like facebook that wasn't facebook, but none of the alternatives seem to have
caught on quite as well yet. (also--I hope my original post didn't insult you
or anyone else reading it on here, that wasn't my intention at all.)

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rohansingh
Does anyone else get the feeling that the newspapers really have no clue what
they are doing? Paywall. No paywall. Paywall again. Login required. No login
required. Facebook-only. No Facebook.

There doesn't seem to be any sort of overarching strategy here, just flailing.

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rjdagost
If newspapers were startups that were "pivoting" would you be as critical of
their changes?

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enraged_camel
That doesn't make any sense. Startups are not fully invested in any product or
process, so they are nimble. Newspapers however are the exact opposite of
startups: they have been here for a very long time. They already have well-
established products. They don't have the luxury of just flailing around by
throwing shit on a wall and seeing what sticks.

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hvs
Actually, since they have more money and are more established, I would argue
that they _do_ have the luxury of throwing shit on the wall and seeing what
sticks. The reason we have companies in this country that are over 100 years
old is because they were able to pivot long after they were established.

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stuaxo
I'm glad they've done that - it was annoying not clicking on their articles.

Having said this, I'm hardly ever in fb any more anyway.

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willay
Always avoided reading their articles because I needed to have the app. Happy
to hear its going!

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nicholassmith
The Guardian actually had a link, that wasn't super visible, that would direct
you from using the app to the website, if you clicked it it'd remember your
decision and _never_ bug you again. It was excellent, none of the other news
publishers did it.

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danso
News publishers had a range of choices on how to implement this. ProPublica
did not enable frictionless sharing or an automatic dialog box asking you to
install an app

[http://www.propublica.org/article/introducing-a-new-non-
evil...](http://www.propublica.org/article/introducing-a-new-non-evil-way-to-
share-our-stories-on-facebook)

I don't think the app was particularly popular leading me to wonder "what's
the point?" (I used to work there) but I suppose for users who choose to live
their lives through FB, giving them the choice of sharing and consuming
through FB isn't necessarily a net negative

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perlpimp
There was a post of what internet was and what was lost - how social media and
prevelance of scocial graph as a tool has changed the game. But it is not
quite certain that everyone is the winner for using a social graph except the
company that manages is it. I think the process and environment surrouning
social graphs has been corrupted and developed not in very forward looking way
and things like that happend because of that.

Frankly facebook I think has bungled the whole advertising and integration of
various internet services into crowded space on the 'wall'. There is much
distraction, few pictures and no action.

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level09
Please kill all these social reader apps, besides privacy infringement and
spam, I've never seen any additional value in these apps to the reader ..

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danso
> _When the Guardian social reader first launched, the impact was dramatic:
> millions of users installed the app within a matter of weeks (a total of 12
> million have installed it so far, according to the Guardian post) and by
> April of this year, 6 million unique visitors were reading content within
> the app every month. According to former Guardian developer Martin Belam,
> Facebook referrers at one point even eclipsed traffic coming from Google.
> After the changes in May, however, the number of readers dropped just as
> dramatically — falling from about 600,000 average users a day to below the
> 200,000 level. Facebook now reports the app as having 2.5 million monthly
> users._

This needs a little more context, doesn't it? Did usage drop because the app
is unpopular? Did it drop because the Guardian is unpopular? Or is Facebook
losing share overall?

The OP does link to a Buzzfeed analysis which points at the culprit being a
change in FB's algorithm: [http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/facebook-social-
readers-ar...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/facebook-social-readers-are-
all-collapsing)

In other words, FB giveth and FB taketh away. The popular explanation may be
that users were just fed up with the intrusion in their lives and the Guardian
is making a principled stand...but let's face it, users have shown more than
enough willingness to accept intrusions. And the Guardian clearly isn't doing
this out of respect for their users' privacy...anger over inadvertent sharing
was immediate at the app's launch, and the Guardian always had the option of
turning off the auto-sharing element.

That said, I'm not sure why the drop in usage requires killing the app. A
referral is a referral, right? Did the app require constant maintenance? There
are some users who _love_ sharing what they read and so why not let them
continue to do so and configure the app to not make such links lead to a "do
you want to install this app" popup.

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mcdowall
"This needs a little more context, doesn't it? Did usage drop because the app
is unpopular? Did it drop because the Guardian is unpopular? Or is Facebook
losing share overall?"

None, FB launched the opengraph plugin with a preferred list of partners,
after the initial bedding in period other media companies were allowed to
join, thus saturating the market and taking % share (UV).

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papsosouid
I'm always amazed when I see companies make the mistake of giving facebook
control over their business, pushing facebook's brand over their own, and
driving people _away_ from their own site instead of towards it. What is so
special about facebook that makes marketing people forget everything they
learned about marketing?

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cheald
It's where the eyeballs are. There's an enormous amount of collective time
spent on Facebook these days. If you can capture a fraction of that, even if
it's just in the form of brand recognition, that's a potential win.

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papsosouid
You seem to have misunderstood. The fact that lots of people use facebook
means marketers should be using facebook to push their brand, and engage with
potential customers. Instead, they are pushing facebook's brand, and telling
customers to go _to_ facebook. Users are already at facebook, so that is just
dumb, and a waste of money. Every time you see a TV ad where some company says
"go to facebook.com/stupidcompany" instead of sending people to
stupidcompany.com is the backwards mentality I refer to in action.

