Facebook – Page 6 – Steven Savage

Facebook has just added a lot of new features to its offering, buttons and graphs and likes and widgets galore. Of course among the various discussions about Facebook, one issue keeps coming up is that Facebook, as it gets bigger, is a single point of failure in people's online lives and identities.

If you think back, there have been a lot of "single points of failure" in peoples online lives. I remember when ICQ was the big chat program, when LinkedIn had no competitors, when everyone worried about Twitter owning people's lives (remember that?). There's always a worry that some provider or web service will dominate everything – and then bad things will happen with hackers, TOS changes, etc.

So we've had a lot of worry about points of failure in our internet lives. Though I have yet to see a Great Online Life Destruction Debacle, it is a possibility of course. However, I've watched many a gloom and doom story about the internet and have yet to see Netageddon happen.

Idle speculation time here.

With Facebook pretty much dominating social media, and having obvious gaming aspirations, I began to wonder what else Facebook can deliver. Once I began theorizing, I really began to wonder more.

Facebook could actually be useful as a way to distribute artistic (comic and manga) and written fiction. Easy for alerts, easy to notify people it's ready, incredibly easy to get more fans to buy into it. Nice, public distribution that makes people very aware of what their friends are doing and reading.

Facebook could be an excellent distribution platform – read the manga there, discuss it with your friends, etc. There's already a lot of this in place now – and the widget creation could let OTHER companies do it while Facebook enjoys the piggybacking and additional attention (and possibly cash).

As its my firm belief community building is a big part of success for media efforts, especially new ones, Facebook is a logical place to try or do some of it. You want to build and maintain an audience – that's one of the ways to do it very fast (with some limits). A retained, happy, engaged audience buys more of your stuff when it comes down to it, and is more likely to want to see you at a con or invite you to one.

Do I think this is where media distribution is going? No. Part part of it doubtlessly will try, far more than is being done now. I await seeing the results.

– Steven Savage