Facebook Largest News Reader?
Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web had an interesting piece suggesting that Facebook could become the world's leading news reader. A recent Facebook company blog entry encouraged members to set up a news feed on Facebook.
Context & Ripple Effects
Marshall Kirkpatrick's argument at Read Write Web, picked up by Hitwise, extends a pattern the corpus has tracked for years: since the Los Angeles Times framed the 'Facebook revolution' in October 2007, the network has been absorbing functions people previously performed elsewhere. By September 2009, ReadWriteWeb itself documented how Facebook was eating away at email usage, and VentureBeat reported Facebook dismissing Twitter as 'in the rear-view mirror.'
What changes here is the target of that absorption: with a company blog entry explicitly urging members to set up a news feed on Facebook, the platform is positioning the News Feed not just as a social inbox but as a primary news-reading surface — a direct challenge to RSS readers and portal home pages as the default way people encounter journalism.
First-order effects
- Facebook gains a new behavioral hook: if members adopt the News Feed as their news reader, page views and session time that went to RSS aggregators and publisher sites route through Facebook instead.
- Publishers' referral traffic patterns begin to hinge on Facebook sharing behavior, making headline and link format decisions on the network materially more valuable to news organizations.
Second-order effects
- Dedicated feed readers and portal front pages face pressure to add social signals — comments, friend activity, likes — or concede the discovery layer to a product whose content updates itself via the social graph.
- Twitter's role as a real-time news surface becomes the direct competitive counterweight, sharpening the rivalry Facebook had already framed dismissively in its 'rear-view mirror' posture.
Third-order effects
- If socially curated feeds displace editor-chosen and user-subscribed reading lists, gatekeeping over which stories reach mass audiences migrates from newsrooms and aggregation tools toward whatever ranking logic a single social platform applies — a concentration of distribution power that sits uneasily alongside the spam and security problems, from the McAfee cleanup deal to identity glitches, the corpus already documents at Facebook's scale.
The trend: News consumption is migrating from self-subscribed feeds and portals toward socially curated streams, with Facebook's graph positioned to decide what large audiences read.