BBC College of Journalism Blog - A vigorous and robust discussion about journalism from every perspective.
- Paul Brannan |
- Friday 25 March 2011, 13:32
The growth of Facebook has been given another boost by the social network's acquisition of mobile start-up Snaptu for an undisclosed sum.
No big deal, you may think, but, as images by Facebook engineering intern Paul Butler show, people accessing the social networking site via their mobiles are twice as active those using it on PCs.
It was Israeli outfit Snaptu which earlier this year built a feature-phone app for Facebook, extending social network access to thousands more devices and into markets where smartphones are less prevalent.
If you add to that purchase the acquisition of group messaging company Beluga and a location-based advertising start-up, Rel8tion, it's plain to see Facebook's intention to capitalise on mobile.
The other big beast in that battle is the subject of David Carr's excellent New York Times piece "The Evolving Mission of Google".
Despite Google's insistence that it is not a media company, Carr makes a good case that it is - and why that's more than a matter of semantics.
The gravitational pull of Google and Facebook has already had a huge impact on how news is distributed, and they're both attracting vast sums of advertising cash that would otherwise have gone to the newspaper and magazine businesses.
At the same time, Google acknowledges that it depends on high-quality content and has "a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem", according to a spokesperson Carr quotes.
For newspapers and magazines struggling to make money from the link economy, that assertion might ring hollow, especially if the ledgers show their own days in the ecosystem might be numbered.
Planets Google and Facebook have pulled money from the press to the traditional web, and now they're doing it again in the mobile world.
According to the folks at Guy Kawasaki's Alltop, Google's algorithm has "had more impact on the shape of the web than anything or anyone since Tim Berners-Lee", and this infographic by SEO Book attempts to show how.
The casualties of this shift in fortunes will of course hopefully be replaced by something better. But, as we've seen with recent natural disasters, the consequences will be traumatic and restoration will take a long time to effect.
- Post categories:
- Internet
Recent Posts
- Jon Snow: the making of a national treasure
- Repressing revolution in the rest of Africa
- Newsgathering for social media - a case study
- The case of the disappearing newspaper campaign
- Google not to blame for journalism's woes
- Twitter for journalists: beyond gathering and distributing content
- French media embrace Sarkozy's Libya action
- Protest numbers: How are they counted?
- The new frontline is inside the newsroom
- Facebook tightens grip on mobile market
- How to produce and direct a documentary
- Preparing the ground for a career in journalism
- Tweeting the Budget: a BBC hashtag experiment
- Has Al Jazeera come of age in the 'Arab Spring'?
- Media meltdown over nuclear threat
- Russian media claims Moscow rift over Libya
- How I tripped up on computers - just like my newspaper
- Mexico: tough role for actor-turned-journalist Ross Kemp
- Russian bloggers force mainstream media climbdown
- Is Wikileaks investigative journalism - or even journalism?
Comments
Sign in or register to comment.