Dave: Facebook is at least seven things. Journalists don’t distinguish. (Me: I think it’s worse than that. I think journalists for the most part ignore the user community, except when they can use it to tell a preconceived story, for example about disinformation. I think Facebook’s connections to the rest of the web barely register as a story, except when news publications are suffering. The story of how Facebook impacts communities at a human level is very interesting but will require time and patience that is mostly lacking in journalism.)
#
- It’s interesting to me that Twitter can tell me whenever someone mentions my tweet, but no blog or web platform can tell me when someone mentions a post, even though the enabling technology is baked into the web. #
- It’s also interesting to me that I wasn’t able to find a namespace extension to RSS for likes or re-shares, even though these have become ubiquitous online social patterns, even implemented on some blogging platforms. I’m surprised no one has created this. (It makes sense it wasn’t built in when RSS started, because the social platforms and patterns didn’t exist yet. But there is a namespace extension mechanism, and at least one “social” open format (namespace?) adopted once by some blog platforms, though it does not do likes or re-shares.)#
- (None of this is a complaint about this or any other blog platform. I’m just surprised it has not been done. When I used to think about building my own publishing platform this was a feature I envisioned. Maybe I can build it some day, maybe as an extension to something else.)#