FACEBOOK turned on a few days back its update to the Notes feature, transforming an otherwise bare-bones writing tool into a more capable blogging system.
I republished two blog posts—a column and a news story for Sun.Star Cebu—on Facebook Notes and found the tool good enough for blogging in the social network. It’s not a full-on blogging tool as it lacks more advanced features of editors of blog content management systems like WordPress or Blogger. Facebook Notes is more of a scaled down version of Medium, the blogging platform founded by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.
Facebook Notes shares the minimalist aesthetic and post editing interface of Medium. In formatting articles, you only have access to a what-you-see-is-what-you-get WYSIWYG editor and not the code. For most people, that WYSIWYG editor is enough.
Notes currently has only one article layout: a full width banner image, title and then body text. You have the minimum text formatting options for two header types, URL links and rendering words bold, italics, and in mono-space for code and blockquotes.
tIt is in being entwined with Facebook that Notes stands out as a blogging platform. It offers granular control on post visibility based on social connections. You can set it to public or limit it to your friends, to a sub-grouping of friends based on the lists you created or to just yourself. Its commenting system is, of course, powered by Facebook identity.
Being closely integrated into Facebook also gives articles published as Notes an added advantage on mobile. Facebook Notes are lovely to read on smaller devices, the text is easy on the eyes and the whole experience good for the reader, much unlike what happens with other websites viewed on mobile. With people spending a large amount of their time on the Facebook app, stories published as Notes have an added advantage offered by that access to a huge audience.
Projects like the revamped Internet.org, Facebook Notes and Instant Articles show that the social networking giant wants to corral users by giving them fewer reasons to leave the Facebook app.
Free Facebook encourages people to keep on using the app and, with content now being hosted within the platform either via Notes or Instant Articles, never leave it. Hey, if you can read the stories on the Facebook app – without having to pay for mobile data because of the free FB promotion and with the stories loading faster because of the automagical caching that it does with Instant Articles – why leave?
With some tweaking, the Facebook app can actually serve as more than a good enough news app. And it will only get better: future versions will likely improve news capability. The company is also reported to be working on a news notification system for mobile—the last possible reason for a news company to put out a mobile app. Ikaw na, Facebook, as kids are wont to say on Facebook.
While advances in news on Facebook will likely boost readership and engagement for media companies, the bigger question is how can media, especially mainstream media, earn from this? How can media companies that produce all these content make money to support newsroom operations?
When the dynamics for social news was to discover stories on Facebook and then be led to external websites, companies could earn from the ads, no matter how paltry the rates and revenue shares were. But if content is consumed on Facebook, ads aren’t as aggressively laid out, which is good for readers but less so for publishers because fewer clicks mean less revenues. Publishers also do not yet have the years-long experience on digital ads similar to the AdSense program offered by Google.
Facebook, to its credit, announced it would share revenues with video creators and Instant Articles publishers. They don’t actually need to, that’s how dominant Facebook is. But let’s hope, for the sake of our own media diets and information needs, that this helps in some way fund the operations, no matter how diminished, of journalism outfits.
(max@limpag.com)