I’ve been saying this for awhile but Mat really articulates it well here. Today, reports that Facebook will display full content from New York Times and others natively inside Facebook, compounds the fact that publishers aren’t willing to do what Facebook will do for them: build an optimal reading experience for mobile (particularly smartphone) consumption.
Facebook’s Chris Cox quoted in Re/Code.
We build Circa entirely based on the problem facing these news organizations, which is to build a natively optimized platform for consuming information on smartphones.
As Leah Finnegan at Gawker said, Facebook purchases its rivals. It consumes its subjects.
There’s some irony that I’m also posting this to Medium, which is as parasitic as Facebook and whose endgame is the same (while its aesthetics may be more alluring.)
I’ve written about digital feudalism before, it’s just becoming more ubiquitous and consuming even larger hosts. We were guppies, now they’re coming after the whales.