Is Facebook Really Where You Go to Watch?
By SAUL HANSELLNot all distribution deals are created equally.
There is a genre of Internet press release that often starts, “Now users of [Web site X] have access to content from [Content Source Y]. These articles typically don’t dwell on the fact that any user of the Web site X could have surfed over to the many other places that Content Source Y’s stuff was already available. And thus they don’t deal with the question: Is Web site X a particularly good place to read or watch that stuff?
So Wednesday, we saw a slew of stories about how Slide, the hot Widget startup, has arranged for video from Hulu, CBS and Warner Brothers on Facebook. It is part of a new Facebook application the company is working on FunSpace Channels that will be opened Thursday.
I don’t get it. Is the core of Facebook about consuming media? That’s always been the biggest difference between MySpace and Facebook. On MySpace, users are defining their personalities by programming their own collage of text, photos, music and video, blending work they created themselves with clips of professional work. When you are on MySpace you read about what your friends are doing, but at the same time you are listing to what they are listening to and watching what they are watching.
Facebook is all about person-to-person and person-to-small group communications. It is using your social connections to improve e-mail not to improve television. I first met Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, in 2006 while I was working on an article on MySpace. He kept using the word “utility,” which is a phrase that doesn’t often come out of the mouth of Chris DeWolfe, his counterpart at MySpace.
When Facebook opened itself up to outside developers last year, it allowed its pages to have some of the cacophony of MySpace profiles. The recent redesign, which hides the outside applications on subordinate pages, reasserts the primacy of Mr. Zuckerberg’s vision of the site as a communication utility.
So what is the appeal of an application, buried inside Facebook, that lets users watch the latest hot clips from Saturday Night Live or CSI? I’ve got to believe that the vast majority of viewers will mainly watch media on sites that are oriented around watching, including the network’s own sites, and sites like YouTube and, yes, MySpace. When people who connect to their friends on Facebook find something they like, it is really quite easy to share it with their friends. They can paste links or embed video players into any number of applications, including Slide’s FunSpace, formerly FunWall.
These days, content owners have no reason not to allow their material on any service that has a plausible business deal. And for Slide, why not take that content, since it’s available, and try to get some extra page views (and PR buzz) from it. But just because you can do a deal that doesn’t hurt anyone doesn’t mean that the rest of us should have to pay attention.
O.K. Bits readers who use Facebook: Am I wrong? Do you love to watch Web video on Facebook?
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