Soon after publishing my last post "Google's Starfish" here, I was very (unpleasantly) surprised to discover the whole post appear as a "note" on my Facebook page. I wouldn't have even noticed that, unless someone post a comment on that post, inside Facebook.
In the past, I did, on my own will, configure the RSS of pashabitz.com to appear on my Facebook.
But still, my natural reaction was to get extremely pissed, even though no explicit rule was probably broken here by Facebook. I've been trying to figure out why I got so mad. Here's what I came up with:

Change of the rules
Facebook changed the behavior in a non-trivial way without asking me first. Commonly, other sites only syndicate a small part of the external content and point back to the original. This is what Facebook did in the past too.
They still have a link to the "original post", but it is very non prominent.

Stealing content...
The whole text of my post on this blog appears as a standard Facebook entity (the "note") virtually exactly as if it was published on Facebook itself. There is absolutely zero motivation and additional value for the reader to click-through to my own site, where I actually posted the content. Also remember that Google doesn't like seeing the exact same content on two different URLs.

...and making money off that content
Guess what - Facebook display an ad on the "note" page which is a copy of my blog post. They get the money for showing that ad.


What do you think?

Want to join me as partner in a cool new startup?
Get in touch: pasha at cohai dot co

Reading "The Starfish and the Spider" now. The book is about how decentralized organizations and entities (the "starfish") without clear hierarchy and leadership are equipped to defeat classic, centralized organizations (the "spider"). One of the first examples given in the book are the p2p music sharing sites that defeated the big record labels.
I immediately started thinking about the centralized giants of software and the internet, and who their "starfish" were.
So with Microsoft it's easy: the Linux operating system is the starfish that "defeated" it.
What about Google (the web search / web advertisement spider) and Amazon (the online shopping spider)? Who (or "what") is going to be their starfish? I think inventing that starfish will be quite interesting.

Want to join me as partner in a cool new startup?
Get in touch: pasha at cohai dot co