{"id":258821,"date":"2014-09-03T13:19:00","date_gmt":"2014-09-03T18:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=258821"},"modified":"2024-01-26T13:20:20","modified_gmt":"2024-01-26T18:20:20","slug":"dont-like-facebook-owning-and-controlling-your-content-use-tools-that-support-the-open-web","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2014\/09\/03\/dont-like-facebook-owning-and-controlling-your-content-use-tools-that-support-the-open-web\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t like Facebook owning and controlling your content? Use tools that support the open Web"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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When it comes to content \u2014 personal or professional \u2014 [company]Facebook[\/company] is a classic double-edged sword: it has such incredible reach that you almost have to use it, and it can drive huge amounts of traffic to your content. But at the same time it is a classic walled garden, run by a black-box algorithm that uplifts or down-ranks<\/a> content for reasons that are completely unknown to anyone outside of the company\u2019s ranks of developers. So how do you work with it, and not give all the power over your content to a proprietary platform?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blogging and RSS pioneer Dave Winer has one potential solution: work with Facebook, but make sure the blog or site you control remains primary. Winer\u2019s latest blogging tool posts simultaneously to Facebook<\/a> and a self-hosted blog \u2014 and unlike other tools that do this, any changes or updates to the blog version are automatically reflected in the Facebook version as well. That way bloggers and other content creators can take advantage of the strengths of Facebook while still maintaining ultimate control over their work and its distribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Especially for media companies, Winer said in an interview, trying to pretend that Facebook doesn\u2019t exist doesn\u2019t really make sense, and isn\u2019t going to work anyway \u2014 so as he described in a post<\/a>, better to figure out ways to use the platform to broaden your reach, but do so in ways that don\u2019t trap your content. That way Facebook wins, but so do you. As he put it to me in our interview:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[blockquote person=\u201d\u201d attribution=\u201d\u201d]If you\u2019d asked me whether I thought there should be a Facebook I would have said no, but now they have a billion users or whatever, and at some point you have to reset your thinking, you can\u2019t just say I wish they weren\u2019t there. Any software shipped now exists in a context where Facebook also exists, and to pretend that it doesn\u2019t is to make your world very small.[\/blockquote]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Facebook wins, but so can you<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s particularly interesting about the new tool for cross-posting and updating Facebook posts, Winer said, is that Facebook reached out to him rather than the other way around \u2014 a sign that the company is trying to become more open. The contact came from Doug Purdy, a senior manager in charge of Facebook\u2019s API and developer relations who worked at Microsoft in the late 1990s, when Winer was collaborating closely with the software giant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it turned out, even Facebook wasn\u2019t aware of how open its API actually was: Winer said that any writing and posting tool should be able to update in both places at once, and the Facebook API documentation specifically said that wasn\u2019t possible \u2014 but when Purdy looked into it, it actually was possible, but the documentation hadn\u2019t been updated yet to reflect that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[blockquote person=\u201d\u201d attribution=\u201d\u201d]The way I see it, I\u2019m sort of negotiating on behalf of the open web, asking them to make some concessions\u2026 and they are already more open than you think they are. That was the purpose of the tool I produced \u2014 it\u2019s a demo, and the point was to show people this is not as limited as people think it is. And their API is incredible, it really is a thing of beauty.[\/blockquote]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Supporting the \u201cindie web\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Winer isn\u2019t the only web veteran who has been stressing the importance<\/a> of maintaining control over one\u2019s content and supporting the open web. Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson wrote recently<\/a> about the power of having a personal blog \u2014 which writers like Curbed founder Lockhart Steele and Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers have returned to recently, and is something very different from using third-party proprietary platforms like Medium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Online journalism veteran Dan Gillmor has also written about<\/a> the importance of defending the open web, and the efforts of a group of developers and programmers focused on tools that help support what they call the \u201cindie web.\u201d These tools allow content creators to distribute their work everywhere and still maintain control \u2014 including one called Bridgy<\/a> that pulls comments from social networks back into a user\u2019s blog \u2014 and the philosophy is to \u201cpublish once and syndicate elsewhere.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is this so important? Because as Gillmor put it in his post: \u201cwhen we use centralized services like social media sites\u2026 we are handing over ultimate control to third parties that profit from our work, material that exists on their sites only as long as they allow.\u201d And that\u2019s not open at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock \/ Luis Santos<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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When it comes to content \u2014 personal or professional \u2014 [company]Facebook[\/company] is a classic double-edged sword: it has such incredible reach that you almost have to use it, and it can drive huge amounts of traffic to your content. But at the same time it is a classic walled garden, run by a black-box algorithm that … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Don\u2019t like Facebook owning and controlling your content? Use tools that support the open Web”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gigaom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258821"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258823,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258821\/revisions\/258823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}