There’s no debate on the fact that facebook and twitter are the biggest content sharing platforms on the planet today. Traditionally, all the content sharing platforms have evolved into creating curated channels in some shape and form. Be it… the most latest example of Tumblr or the old and not-so-popular-now like Digg and Delicious. Would facebook and twitter take the same path in the near future ?
In my view, they won’t… or more appropriately… they shouldn’t. In past, the crowd-sourced examples of curation or filteration have not worked for long. Due to the inherent architecture of the user generated content, of all the users on the network… very few share and most of the people, just consume. So if I am right, at one point in time, the home page of Digg was controlled by very small subset of the users which of course didn’t represent whole universe. The same centralized filtering structure was adopted by Flickr, Delicious, Digg and others. They all faded primarily due to this centralized, managed by few – index of popular category of content channels.
When there are 1000s of new curation, filtering and sorting apps for facebook and twitter and they seemed be mostly adding the UX layer on top of backend data collected from users own connection on these platform – why doesn’t it make sense for facebook and twitter to come up with their content curation channels. Why they don’t show- What’s hot in news, sports, entertainment and lifestyle from facebook and twitter.
Twitter already provides a little bit of this through trending topics and knows twitter users by their category – then why not curated channels. Twitter has the direct connection with the content, access to t.co and bit.ly analytics and much more powerful collection of the data. The same is true with facebook – it knows the content format, knows the individual domains from the publishers and already has the facebook (data) insights.
They might have plans to do it in the future. But if the actually do it, will it solve the problem or add to the chaos. Here’s why…
Digg tried to become a go to site for the fresh and the interesting. Directly competing with portals and news providers – made very few publishers happy. It became a game and competition rather – if you are on the home page it’s great otherwise you recieve almost zero. There was no metadata or communication or thought captured besides the action ‘Digg’. Twitter RT are slightly different, limited by 140 characters but Re-tweet accomodate or may pass a comment besides a simple +1 vote. Facebook adds layers through share, recommend and like variations and capacity to accomodate comments along with it.
The beauty and appeal to the publisher is the popularity qualifier is not ‘featuring of content on yet another property – highly controlled by few users’ but rather ripples of viral effect spreadable through their existing audiences who are most likely to exist on these platform and getting popular with small incremental exposure through users own six-degrees of seperation.
So basically, ‘I wish this could feature on the Digg home page today’ to the effect of ‘total number of impressions on publisher network & click throughs of likes and tweets’ and then the spread on social networks with the same logic – ‘further impressions based on users network and further click throughs obtained in multiple small ponds of closed groups’.
The publisher might not get ‘you have been digged or slashdotted effect’ but receives a steady stream of traffic through facebook and twitter engagements and derives seasonal spikes in good times. I am not sure if some publisher really enjoyed this kind regular and some default-nature traffic from centralized sharing networks like digg and others.
For facebook and twitter knowing this information but not sharing with public is actually good and favourable.
- It doesn’t generate the competition within publishers to aim for some coveted top slots. It’s not ‘works or doesn’t work’ kind of situation. They always find that content works and can work better with their continued engagement and efforts. Just like SEO.
- If facebook and twitter are becoming the de-facto platform – why would they break their relationship with application providers – news readers, social media management tools and such. These application providers add UX layers, provide continual access to evolving devices and access points, solve business case or use case scenarios – which might not be of their existing product development priorities. If they concentrate on doing all the things themselves – they would have multiple points of failures.
- The ambiguity of multiple closed content channels and networks is much more promising than creating master channels. The users blinded by what’s surfacing on top – try to act upon their liking or aligning themselves with their network likings works much for benefit for publishers and these networks. This way users create their own personal home page (profile) – replicating their individual digg home page and the comments and action received is that user’s gratification first and the publishers traffic next.
- An openly exposed curated channel (by machine or humans) would give the same product a different twist. Suddenly the user might not feel important or altogether out of place or slight frustrated that his/her content didn’t claim the top slot. After all, we all run our own content channels on twitter and facebook. The other way to look at it is – a set of users by the sheer design of the feature or sheer coincidence of social network alignment – may form dominance and defeat the purpose of entire curation. Curation on a daily basis on the merit of content is highly unlikely romantic wish-list of a product manager – the community will always act towards making it a standard sample of small set of aligned users. The digg home page effect so to speak.
- This also makes publishers unhappy. They now have to wait for blockbuster events on these social networks rather than regular audience continuously acting upon their content and bringing the steady state traffic.
- Curation and channels cannot also be explained in standard format. The events like ‘occupy wall street’ – where should they feature ?. Is it important to slot them into general categories like news and politics or they merit a hashtag of their own to be directly exposed to the network. Or simply spread on it’s merit via non-categorized or keyword tagged taxonomy agnostic facebook.
- This can also be explained via ‘The Long Tail Effect’ theory – the unlimited long tail permutation and combinations of users networks and their individual curation or filtering networks are much more precious than top blockbuster content featured on home pages of Digg and Google News.
Due to the above, it might be unlikely that twitter and facebook will come up with their own curated content channels or if they come up… what problems they need to solve. Actually I am getting worried with the un-necessary killer talks centered around Google+, and facebook with the new list feature and with change of content display logic – it suddenly looks more generalistic and not a space of personal raves and ransts. If people have just started ‘more’ likes and shares on facebook – that might be temporarily good for the publishers in terms of traffic spikes but in the long run looses users personal touch and opinions from closed networks.
People spending more time is good but people spending more time due to more content and more processing of information is not.
Haven’t you noticed that you are suddenly seeing more funny pictures and videos on facebook ? . Would you prefer being a friend or a subscription ?. News from people or yet another replacement for news feeds with faces. Twitter is already that, isn’t it.
