Frienemies get hitched.
Big news broke in the social media world Monday. Facebook bought FriendFeed. If you’re not part of either social network you can move along. There’s nothing to see here.
But for old time journalists like me, this is akin to the New York Times buying the Associated Press. Friendfeed was a way for you to update sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google and even your own blog. You can also see all your friends’ updates, whether your are logged into their service or not. It is an aggregator.
The Web is blowing up with this story. Reports are everywhere. What’s unfortunate is, versions of these stories will be in a newspaper tomorrow. That’s a shame.
The people who care about this already know about it. They’re also the ones who don’t take newspapers. The people who don’t care won’t know what the hell their local fishwrap is talking about when they read it.
This is reflective of the disconnect newspapers have to fight through if they intend to survive through the next decade. All they see with this Facebook/FriendFeed story is content. They aren’t thinking about their audience. That is why papers continue to run wire stories from Timbuktu. It fills a news hole that would have been filled with local copy by a reporter they had to lay off.
Those laid off journalists still have mad skills and they have the ability to beat the dailies to whatever pay model they try to come up with. And even if newspapers come up with a good pay model, there will always be someone who will do it for free. (See Craigslist.)
I really hope I’m wrong. I hope the Facebook/FriendFeed story stays on the Web. But it won’t. Please, let me know otherwise, because I’d love to eat some crow on this.
