Month: October 2015

If you’re of a certain age, the web has a single thing at its core, and that is the hyperlink—those blue links that allow one page to connect to another, creating a kind of interlocking global mesh of URLs. But if you’re someone who lives on social networks like Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat, links don’t matter nearly as much because you hardly ever see them, and even if you do, you probably never click on them.

Facebook’s “Instant Articles” and Twitter’s new Moments feature seem to be accelerating this phenomenon, for better or worse. The whole point of Facebook’s project, in which it has formed partnerships with publishers like the New York Times, is that the content from those publishers exists completely inside Facebook’s mobile app. It’s consumed there, and shared there—there’s no link to an external site because it’s not necessary.

Twitter seems to be taking a similar approach with Moments, which consists of curated tweets and images that are selected by the company’s editorial staff. They are a great way to catch up on the news, but if you want to get at the link to the underlying content, it is hidden three clicks deep in a sub-menu. Realistically, there’s zero chance that anyone will actually click on any of those links.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Facebook, Twitter and the death of the link”

Google won a decisive victory on Friday in a copyright-infringement case that the Authors Guild originally launched almost a decade ago. A federal appeals court ruled that the company’s book-scanning project, which has turned millions of books into searchable digital files, is entitled to the full protection of the “fair use” clause in copyright law.

The case is hugely important, not just for Google and for the authors whose works are being digitized, but for the principle of fair use itself. Copyright law may be murky and difficult to pin down at the best of times, but interpreting the concept of fair use often makes regular copyright law look like a day at the beach.

That’s because what qualifies as fair use — which theoretically allows anyone to use copyrighted content without having to get permission from the creator or rights-holder — isn’t spelled out in federal copyright law. It’s something that ultimately has to be decided by a court, and even then the judges have to consider four factors before they can come to a decision. Those factors are:

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Google’s victory in book-scanning case is totally justified”

Every few weeks, it seems, another media outlet kills off its reader comments, saying they are filled with trolls and spam and/or they are too much effort to maintain. This week it’s Motherboard, the tech site from Vice Media, which claims that it has replaced comments with something better — namely, a selection of emailed letters to the editor, which editor-in-chief Derek Mead says will be published once a week “or thereabouts.”

Motherboard joins a growing group of sites that have shut down their reader comment sections over the past year or so, including The Verge, Re/code, Mic, The Week, USA Today and Popular Science just to name a few. But are media outlets being too hasty in giving up on this outlet for reader feedback? I think they are.

The note from Mead hits all the usual highlights about why comments are bad, and why sites like Motherboard have decided to get rid of them: 1) They are filled with “garbage” from trolls, and that in turn keeps others from commenting; 2) Moderation would take resources that could be better spent on “real” journalism; 3) Commenters are a small proportion of readers, and therefore not worth bothering with; 4) Social media like Twitter and Facebook exist, and therefore no one needs comments.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Are comments dead, or have media outlets just given up on them?”

As expected, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has once again taken the helm of the company he helped create, despite the fact that he also happens to be the CEO of another startup, digital payment company Square. Twitter’s board appears to be convinced that Dorsey has what it takes to build and grow the service, despite his somewhat troubled history with the company. But will he be able to fix the mistake Twitter made several years ago, when it turned its back on the idea of being an open ecosystem?

Much of the coverage of Twitter [fortune-stock symbol=”TWTR”] tends to focus on the minutiae of the service, and the features that it does or doesn’t have: Whether it should allow tweets of greater than 140 characters, for example, or the idea of introducing a curated feed a la Facebook, which is what the company’s highly-touted Project Lightning is supposed to be all about — as though that will make everything right.

These questions and debates, however, tend to assume that Twitter itself is the only one who can solve these problems. The assumption is that it needs to have a product-focused CEO who can dream up solutions or features that will magically make Twitter the billion-plus user service it has always wanted to be. This is partly why there was such a clamor for Dorsey to return — because founders, even ones with a troubled history, are seen as having quasi-magical powers when it comes to fixing the thing they created.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Dear Jack: Twitter needs to become more open or it will die”