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Skube vs. Marshall and the LA Times’ editorial kabuki

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If you’re going to write a cranky op-ed complaining that bloggers aren’t fit to shine real reporters’ shoes, as a journalism prof named Michael Skube did recently in the LA Times, and then you cite Josh Marshall as one of your examples of these failures to pound the pavement, you shouldn’t be surprised if people snort in derision. Love it or hate it (I love it), Marshall’s Talking Points Memo is the model of a muckraking blog; it regularly breaks stories.

But wait, this gets more ridiculous. Marshall emailed Skube, who told him that he didn’t include Marshall (or any of the other blogger examples) in the piece; some editor inserted that sentence. “Perhaps I’m naive,” Marshall wrote. “But it surprises me a great deal that a professor of journalism freely admits that he allows to appear under his own name claims about a publication he concedes he’s never read.”

Now Jay Rosen has written a blistering retort to Skube’s piece, complete with a crowdsourced litany of examples of blogging-driven reporting. And the LA Times has posted an editor’s note about the matter Marshall raised.

Ah, you figure, the paper decided to set the record straight. Think again. The editor’s note is entirely devoted to presenting a semi-mea-culpa note from Skube: “An editor asked if it would be helpful to include the names of the bloggers in my piece as active participants in political debate. I agreed.”

So, before, Skube had told Marshall that “I didn’t put your name into the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site…Your name was inserted late by an editor.” Now, he’s saying exactly the same thing, only he’s also admitting that he approved of the change even though he didn’t really know if it was true. And the paper is saying, “See? The writer agreed to the change! So there’s no problem!”

The LA Times editorial page editor seems to think that this comic routine closes the case. Sorry. Both the paper and the professor now look bad. The editor’s note tells readers that the paper cares more about proving its rectitude in the relatively arcane question of whether the editor had checked with Skube before inserting Marshall’s name than it cares about actually providing its readers with an accurate description of Marshall’s blog as one that does or does not do original reporting.

It’s bad enough for a newspaper to have made this silly error; but everyone makes errors. The damning behavior is the refusal to admit the mistake; the game of finger-pointing; the hiding behind the gears of process; and the institutional facade that says, “Something went awry here but we’ll never come clean because our dignity is more important than the truth.”

Ironically, the LA Times seems to think it’s OK to not correct the piece because, hey, it’s just an op-ed, everyone’s entitled to an opinion. But Skube’s complaint against blogs is built on the notion that opinion is inferior to “the patient fact-finding of reporters.” It’s unfortunate for him that an argument along the lines of “blogs such as Josh Marshall’s are inferior because they don’t do real reporting” is widely known to be false.

I will let Skube have the last word: “Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life… The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.”
[tags]blogging, josh marshall, michael skube, journalism, corrections, los angeles times[/tags]

Drudge, Rosenstiel, and the news media’s RIAA strategy

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At the end of an LA Times profile of Matt Drudge, journalism teacher and expert Tom Rosenstiel admits that Drudge has “come to play an important role”:

In a study of the online medium’s election-night performance in November, Rosenstiel says his group found that Drudge quickly sent his audience to the best destinations. “He had figured out in real time what we figured out more conclusively in hindsight,” Rosenstiel says.

When the balance of the Senate came down to the race in Virginia, for example, Drudge linked to the secretary of state’s office for updated tallies. The resulting flood of visitors crashed the government site.

Still, Rosenstiel says, “Drudge is vulnerable because he’s not producing anything. He’s just got muscle through his links to the work of others.”

One day, he says, news organizations are going to say, “We’re not going to give this stuff away to Drudge. We need to get some source of revenue to subsidize the creation of the content.”

Although Drudge has spent years taking aim at the mainstream media, Rosenstiel says, the truth is he needs their links for his livelihood.

“The dirty little secret about Drudge,” Rosenstiel says, “is that he’s a gateway for conventional journalism.”

I found this a fascinatingly muddled perspective. On the one hand, Rosenstiel says, Drudge is doing something better than the big newsrooms: figuring out where to send his visitors in real time. On the other hand, he’s vulnerable because all he’s doing is linking to other people. Rosenstiel describes a situation in which the big, established publications know that Drudge can send them firehose-level traffic; yet he somehow concludes that it’s Drudge who “needs” the media’s “links for his livelihood.” In fact, he’s just described the precise reverse. Then there’s the threat that the media might somehow stop “giving this stuff away” to Drudge. But nobody’s giving anything away to Drudge — when we publish on the Web, we hand the URL to everyone. How exactly would you boycott Drudge without also sequestering your work from the entire Web?

I’m no fan of Drudge; I’ll visit other filters, thank you. But vast swarms of people clearly like his approach. He had a first-mover advantage but he’s also found a formula that works. If many people are choosing Drudge as their “front page” over the front pages of newspaper sites and magazine sites and portals, the appropriate question to ask is, why? Why is a low-budget two-person operation satisfying some significant chunk of the public better than the formidable resources of the big newsrooms?

Rosenstiel, lost in the same “who stole our business model?” fog that is enveloping so many of his colleagues at the journalism schools and in the newsrooms, doesn’t even notice this question buried in his contradictory statements. Sure, these new Web news models erode the underlying media businesses that pay newsroom salaries. But the answer isn’t to ignore customers’ preferences and threaten to take your marbles home. That’s the RIAA strategy the music industry pursued, and look how successful it proved.

Editors and publishers need to start by accepting reality. Drudge’s neo-Walter Winchell act is simply one example of what the Web does to the news: It places new “front ends” on the mainstream news back-end — remixing new front pages to the pool of news the network aggregates. The algorithmic editing of sites like Memeorandum is another example. The communal editing of Digg is another. Here’s yet another, which, apparently, springs in part from the efforts of Michael “Burn Rate” Wolff. (See this piece in today’s Times about Wolff and Newser.) Despite that, I rather like it. (In fact, it’s where I found that Drudge profile in the first place.)

Why aren’t today’s newspaper editors conducting more of these experiments themselves? Why have they ceded the field to twentysomething entrepreneurs and marginal mavericks? Obviously, institutional inertia, turf-protection reflexes and disappearing-profit panic are all potent forces. On a deeper level, I think most editors just hate the idea that readers might prefer an alternative mix of their news product. They’d rather go down with their ships than accept a demotion of their authority.
[tags]matt drudge, newser, newspaper industry, tom rosenstiel[/tags]

Newspaper shrinkage

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This morning the New York Times joined much of the rest of the American newspaper industry in shrinking its pages. The result for it — as for the Wall Street Journal, which made the same change recently — is that the paper now feels like a toy. Oh, sure, we’ll get used to the change. But at a time when all these papers are already watching their gravitas ebbing away, this change — designed to save printing, paper and distribution costs — is a self-inflicted wound.

The Times says it’s losing 11 percent of its column-inches, but making half of that up by adding pages. The op-ed and editorial pages are permanently smaller, though. And look where the Times — like the Journal before it — decided to cut back: the letters to the editor. (Originally, the Journal also buried its letters page far from the editorials; after a hue and cry from its readers, the letters got shoved back to the flip-side of the editorial page.)

Here we are, in the middle of a vast transformation of the news media from a one-way broadcast mode into a many-to-many free-for-all, and, when push comes to shove, the great newspapers of America decide that the one place they can afford to cut back is the paltry few columns they have traditionally dedicated to their readers.

It’s hard to see this as anything other than another twist on a long downward spiral.
[tags]newspapers, new york times[/tags]

Murdoch, the Journal, and the newsroom diaspora

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It is no surprise that Rupert Murdoch will be the new owner of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal: This was inevitable from the moment he put his money on the table (at a share price approaching double the market value).

Nor is there any surprise in the ritualistic pronouncements being heard throughout the world of traditional journalism — beginning on the Journal’s own editorial page with assurances from both the editorial column and the paper’s publisher that standards will be upheld and independence will be maintained, and spreading far and wide. These assertions are inevitable. Equally inevitably, they will be trotted out to be quoted, with suitable irony, the first time the paper’s new owner throws his weight around and demonstrates their irrelevance.

So the Journal will now have an oversight committee of some sort — a figleaf-shaped offering to pacify the consciences of those members of the Bancroft family who felt some remorse at grabbing Murdoch’s cash. Murdoch will pay no more attention to the oversight of such a committee than the president his TV network helped elect pays his congressional overseers. (Congress, at least, has some constitutional authority.)

And why should he? He paid good money for the Journal. The Journal is a property first and foremost. Under our economic system — the one that the Journal has always championed — owners are free to manage their properties. It is this cold reality, far more than any specific fears about how Murdoch will wreck the Journal’s newsroom (which is full of great talent but which many outsiders in the profession see as overstaffed and underworked), that has so many journalists wringing their hands.

The truth is that most professional journalists in the U.S. have lived in a cocoon for decades. The so-called Chinese wall that separates the newsroom from the business side is typically framed as a noble device for insuring that advertiser cash does not influence news coverage. That’s an important goal. But in practice these walls are only as strong as the ethical principles of those who maintain them. Pair a bullying publisher with a weak-willed editor and no wall will help.

Meanwhile, these walls have had a more insidious effect on the newsroom side: they have encouraged journalists to pay no attention to the economic basis for their work. Most editorial employees in major-city newsrooms, protected by their unions and shielded from the “dark side” of business by the traditional wall, end up thinking of their jobs as the journalistic equivalent of endowed university chairs.

This worked as long as the news business remained healthily profitable — and, in many areas, a monopoly. But in the past couple of decades, technological change has knocked over the business’s foundations. The endowments are going bankrupt. The walls are crumbling.

Journalists’ reactions to all this have generally fallen into two camps. Some dream that the old order can somehow be reconstituted. Find an angel investor who doesn’t mind losing money! Set up non-profit newsrooms! Do anything as long as you can find a way to maintain the journalist’s state of purity!

Others have looked at the changing business and said, no way are we going to be able to beat this, so let’s join it. Let’s take the principles we understand — accuracy and fairness and independence and speaking truth to power — and see how we can ferry them into the new environment.

Doing so requires some level of entrepreneurial thinking. You can’t avoid getting your hands a little grubby. You can’t sit back and let somebody else worry about the “dark side” while you keep yourself immaculate. But you don’t get stuck in the powerless, paralyzing backwaters of so many of today’s newsrooms, either. You trade in the infantilizing paternalism of the old-school newsroom for a level of autonomy that is precious.

I made this choice when I left the San Francisco Examiner in 1995; many others have made it since. It’s not easy. But there are plenty of examples of success. Salon is the one I’m most familiar with, but there are a million experiments out there — from big-name blogs and blog networks to tiny local sites to niche news efforts.

Some of these manage to pull off the neat trick of staying afloat and staying ethical; others don’t. But none that aims to pay a staff has the luxury of pretending that it’s not a business. Now the Wall Street Journal’s journalists face the same choice.

I don’t trust Rupert Murdoch. He has a long and well-documented record of using his properties to further his own agenda. But I trust that there are a lot of smart writers and editors at the Journal. Either they’ll get an opportunity to reshape their paper in a way that suits the times and their own consciences — or they’ll find themselves in the great newsroom diaspora with the rest of us, helping figure out new models for the future.
[tags]journalism, wall street journal, dow jones, rupert murdoch, new media, newspapers[/tags]

Defacing online memorials: plus ca change…

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Salon has a piece today on “The New American Way of Death” about MyDeathSpace, a site that points to the MySpace profiles of recently deceased members, highlights the untimely deaths of young people and offers a discussion space for visitors to post notes — often rude — about the departed. It’s a good, well-researched article that raises questions about the site without taking a crotchety “ban the bums” line. (One of the pleasures of my new status is that I get to read the Salon daily lineup as a surprising cornucopia of reading material rather than the end-product of an inevitably messy editorial process in which I’ve been immersed.)

The thing is, there’s very little that’s “new” about MyDeathSpace. In 1996 I wrote a piece for Salon (we took that summer to publish a special “Death Issue”) titled “Ashes to Ashes, Bits to Bits.” The piece covered a number of topics, including the Well community’s response to Tom Mandel’s death and Timothy Leary’s vision of digital eternity. It also recounted an early instance of the MyDeathSpace phenomenon of flaming the dearly departed: the City of Berkeley’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial site hosted discussion boards, and they became a flashpoint for old political arguments. (The page, remarkably, is still there.)

As I wrote back in 1996: “If we are going to build our memorials on the Net, we have to expect that its boisterousness and its disrespect will spill over into their precincts.” As in the Web of “home pages” and discussion boards a decade ago, so on today’s sometimes anti-social “social Web.”
[tags]death, myspace, online memorials, salon[/tags]

Those darn irrational voters

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Nick Kristof’s New York Times column today (behind the pay wall, alas) summarizes the findings of a book by Bryan Caplan titled “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.” Kristof quotes this summary of the book’s thesis, in Caplan’s words: “This book develops an alternative story of how democracy fails. The central idea is that voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.”

What are the ways in which voters are “worse than ignorant”? Kristof summarizes Caplan’s complaints of “systematic error” in voter rationality: Voters share “a suspicion of market outcomes and a desire to control markets.” They have “an anti-foreign bias,” evidenced by an unwillingness to embrace free trade wholeheartedly. They share “a neo-Luddite bias against productivity gains that come from downsizing or “creative destruction.'” And they have a “pessimistic bias, a tendency to exaggerate economic problems.”

Gee, it sounds like the real problem Caplan has with the voting public is that they don’t agree with the program of conservative economists!

There are a couple of ironies here.

There’s something hilarious about a market-oriented economist complaining about “irrational” behavior. Free-market theory depends on the notion that market participants are rational actors; if they’re irrational, then the whole theory collapses — the market doesn’t behave predictably. For classical economics to work, we need to trade in the populace and get us a better one. The whole thing reminds me of Brecht’s sarcastic suggestion that “the government dissolve the people and elect another.”

But let’s not knock the rabble so fast. Those voters may not be so irrational after all. Free-market economists wish that voters whose jobs are threatened by foreign competition would somehow become farseeing altruists, and trust that the general benefit that free trade provides might eventually lift their boats sometime after the same tide put them out of work. But these “ignorant,” “irrational” voters insist on trying to protect their jobs. The nerve! Why should they think it’s all right to act in their own short-term self-interest? Oh, right, it’s only CEOs and hedge-fund investors who have the economists’ blessing for short-term, self-centered thinking.

Personally, I’m reasonably comfortable with the pro-free-trade argument. But you won’t find me sneering at those who sense that the dynamic of the global economy is not doing them or their families any good.

Caplan is an economist at George Mason University, which (among many other things) is a center for conservative libertarian thinking. His Web site includes a “Libertarian purity test” and his “intellectual autobiography” is replete with references to Ayn Rand — so his perspective, while blinkered, is hardly surprising. But I wonder why Kristof presented the economist’s ideas so uncritically.
[tags]globalization, economics, bryan caplan, libertarians[/tags]

There is no “first blogger”

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“It’s been 10 years since the blog was born,” said a Wall Street Journal headline on Saturday. The article that followed declared, “We are approaching a decade since the first blogger — regarded by many to be Jorn Barger — began his business of hunting and gathering links…”

The article admits that “The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger, are imperfect exercises” — but it barely lifts a finger to try to sort out the truth. Writer Tunku Varadarajan really wouldn’t have had to look very far: Declan McCullagh’s CNET piece earlier this year was not perfect, but it got a lot more of the story right than Varadarajan did.

Who be these “many” who regard Barger as the first blogger? Can Varadarajan name a single one? Barger’s Robot Wisdom was indeed the first site to call itself a “Weblog.” (“Blog” came later, via Peter Merholz.) But Barger was nowhere near the first person to create a Web page with frequent updates sorted in reverse chronological order — if you wish to define “blog” on the basis of that key design feature. Dave Winer’s Scripting News was going full bore well before Barger’s site started up; Winer, in turn was preceded by semi-bloggish sites like Ric Ford’s Macintouch.

Others choose to define blogging more in terms of content. (None of them names Barger as the first blogger, either.) The problem is that, from this angle, too, there are multiple roots: blogs are commonly vehicles for self-revelation — so maybe Justin Hall, the inspiring pioneer of link-filled Web diaries, was the ur-blogger. But others see the heart of blogging as being the assembly of a list of annotated links — in which case the first blog might well be, as Dave Winer has said, Tim Berners-Lee’s very first web page at CERN. (Similarly, Marc Andreessen jokes that the original NCSA “What’s New” page from 1993 was his first blog.) Then there are those who see blogs primarily as fast-moving sources for news and rumors; these people (I tend to disagree with them, but they’re out there) will typically point to Matt Drudge as a blogging progenitor.

Since the Journal article came out, the blogosphere’s self-correction mechanism has been going at full tilt. As happens in this medium, lots of good suggestions are coming to light.

Still, I think there’s a lot of needless effort being dedicated toward a pointless goal — the identification of a “first” that is really only of use to old-fashioned editors eager to fill slow-news days with anniversary features.

The hunt for “the first blog” or “the day blogging started” will be in vain. Like many significant phenomena in our world, blogging does not have a single point of origin. Blogging as we know it today slowly accreted from multiple input streams. It’s a set of practices built around a set of tools, and the practices and tools co-evolved. There are a handful of central figures in the story. They’re all important. Why argue about “firsts” when the thing whose first instance you are hunting down is impossible to strictly define?

The Journal piece, which included brief essays by a dozen celebrities and high-profile bloggers, tilts heavily toward the political wing of the blogosphere, which is only one galaxy in this continuously expanding multiple universe. That distortion is perhaps understandable from a newspaper that lies at the nexus of conservative American power and money. But, sheesh, ye Journal-ites, you ought to get your facts right.

Ironically, the Journal’s biggest-name essayist, Tom Wolfe, arrogantly dismisses the blogosphere for its “narcissistic shrieks and baseless ‘information.'” His chief complaint, oddly, is aimed not at blogs at all but at Wikipedia, which apparently contains an anecdote about him that he says is false (I should say “contained” — the page has of course been updated based on his complaint).

Blogs, Wikipedia, what’s the difference? To Tom, it’s all that crazy stuff on the Internet, and to hell with it. Plainly, we should forget about what we read online and trust titans like the Journal — they’re so rock-solid reliable on the facts!
[tags]blogs, blogging, web history[/tags]

Slaves to the inbox

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My latest Salon article is “Empty thine inbox” — a piece about e-mail overload hitched to reviews of three current books: “Send,” an e-mail etiquette guide by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe; Mark Hurst’s “Bit Literacy,” which outlines a methodology for personal-information management; and Mark Frauenfelder’s “Rule the Web,” a treasury of tips and tricks for taking control of, and enjoying, one’s online life.

The piece takes a brave stand against the injunction to maintain strict inbox hygiene:

My inbox is not a desk that must be cleared. It is a river from which I can always easily fish whatever needs my attention. Why try to push the river? Computer storage is cheaper than my time; archiving is easier than deleting… Do we really want the job of in-box attendant and e-mail folder file clerk? The mess is Augean scale, the job Sisyphean futile.

One other angle on this subject that I did not work into the article comes from Ducky Sherwood, who wrote books on how to handle e-mail burdens some years ago (and who also has a great resource page on all things email):

I’m a bit bothered by an implicit characterization that “email is the problem.” This isn’t fair to the medium. Your problem is that lots of people give you stuff to do. (“Read my message” falls into the category of “stuff to do”.) People have been overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that other people give them to do since long before email.

[tags]productivity, email, gtd, pims, personal information management[/tags]

Nielsen vs. Andreessen on blogging

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Over here, first, in this corner, we’ve got usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen is telling us that smart people will forget about blogging and write articles. Blogs, says Nielsen, are a dime a dozen. If you want to “demonstrate world-class expertise,” write long, in-depth articles that you can get people to pay for.

“Blog postings,” says Nielsen, “will always be commodity content: there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s comments.” Note how the definition has shifted without notice: all blog posts have somehow become “short comments on somebody else’s comments.”

As the article continues, Nielsen explains that his advice is aimed at the person who wants to establish that he is the number-one expert among the thousand bloggers in a field. This quantitative focus is awfully crude: among 1000 specialists, who’s to say there is a “number one”? By what measure? You’re going to find a whole range of sub-specialists and eccentrics, deep-niche experts and synthesizing generalists. But Nielsen’s analysis is built around this sort of comparative ranking. He maintains that, since blog posts are so variable in quality, a blog will never do a good job of showcasing your expertise. If you want to be top dog, make sure your barks are long and full of detailed research.

But Nielsen’s tract isn’t actually about how to become a “world-class expert” or even how to broadcast one’s world-class-expert-hood. It’s about the most efficient way to get people to pay for your content. Nielsen starts from the assumption that your goal isn’t self-expression or persuasion or enjoyment or anything besides customer acquisition. People won’t pay for blogs; therefore, blogging is a waste of time.

But no blogger I’ve ever heard of has actually tried to charge for content (tip jars are the closest anyone’s come). No one seems to want to do so; it runs counter to blogging’s DNA. Long, in-depth articles are a wonderful thing; who would dismiss their value? But Nielsen blithely dismisses the value in 999 out of a thousand blogs. He doesn’t seem to understand that, most of the time, that value is created not in hope of finding paying customers but, simply, for love.

Now then: here, in the other corner, we have Marc Andreessen. He’s the guy who whipped up the first popular Web browser for personal computers. In 2003 he rashly dissed the need for blogging, saying, “I have a day job. I don’t have the time or ego need.”

But he’s come around, and in the past few weeks he’s poured a huge amount of thought and energy into an impressive new blog. Yesterday, in a post titled “Eleven lessons learned about blogging, so far,” Andreessen wrote, “It is crystal clear to me now that at least in industries where lots of people are online, blogging is the single best way to communicate and interact”:

Writing a blog is way easier than writing a magazine article, a published paper, or a book — but provides many of the same benefits.

I think it’s an application of the 80/20 rule — for 20% of the effort (writing a blog post but not editing and refining it the quality level required of a magazine article, a published paper, or a book), you get 80% of the benefit (your thoughts are made available to interested people very broadly).

Arguably blogging is better because the distribution of a blog can be even broader than a magazine article, a published paper, or a book, at least in cases where the article/paper/book is restricted by a publisher to a limited readership base.

Andreessen obviously isn’t writing his blog with any intent to try to charge people for it (as one of the founders of Netscape he presumably doesn’t need that kind of change). I doubt, either, that he is blogging in order to be known as the one-in-a-thousand expert on anything. So Nielsen would tell him, don’t bother — don’t waste your time.

Andreessen doesn’t look likely to heed such counsel. Certainly, as a tech-industry celebrity, he’s had it relatively easy in attracting attention and readers. But he’s hardly coasting. His posts, in fact, look suspiciously like the long, in-depth articles Nielsen advocates; they just happen to be posted in blog form.

From what I can tell, Andreessen is blogging because he finds it fun. Because it connects him to a wider group of people who share his interests. Because it gives him a chance to think out loud and tell war stories and give advice. And because, having started, he can’t stop writing (long, in-depth) posts.

It looks a lot like love.
[tags]jakob nielsen, marc andreessen, blogging[/tags]

Facebook needs work

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I am by far not the first to point this out, but it bears repetition: Facebook has some big problems with its matrix for defining relationships among friends.

The first generation of social networks were mocked for offering only a simple binary choice of “friend” or “not friend.” Facebook — which started as a network for college students, but opened its doors to the world a few months ago, and is now growing like mad — isn’t much of an improvement. But at least it lets you fill in some blanks and better define your relationship with particular friends.

Each time you confirm a “friend request” from someone on Facebook, you’re confronted with a screen that asks for details. This is the list of options:

How do you know [this friend]?
Lived together
Worked together
From an organization or team
Took a course together
From a summer / study abroad program
Went to school together
Traveled together
In my family
Through a friend
Through Facebook
Met randomly
We hooked up
We dated
I don’t even know this person.

This is a great list if you are 19 years old. It is pretty much useless for the rest of us. And even if you try to use the “worked together” feature, you will get tripped up.

For instance: I know a developer named Jake Savin because he worked at Userland during the period when Userland and Salon ran a blogging program together. Jake just sent me a “Friend request” and asked me to confirm that we “worked together.” I’m happy to do this; but Facebook seems to believe that “worked together” can only mean “worked together at the same company” — so if I confirm Jake’s request, Facebook seems to think I’m saying that I, too, worked for Userland. Which is ridiculous. There’s no tool by which one can express the many shades of relationship as they exist outside of a campus environment.

Facebook has garnered enormous attention from the media and from developers since it opened its platform to allow other companies to build “Facebook applications” that add new capabilities to the Facebook system. But Facebook’s social-networking design needs some basic plumbing work. Before some other company plunks down a few billion for Facebook’s hotness — or before the investment bankers take it public — some basic upgrades are in order.
[tags]social networks, facebook, friending[/tags]