Important headlines for July 30th - South Florida School books & Facebook
Bottom Line: These are stories you shouldn't miss and my takes on them...
Excerpt: Petty often made jokes or sarcastic remarks that mention blacks, Jews, Muslims, gays, liberals, unions and public education. But the context is often unclear.
Hot Take: On one hand there's a case to be made about a double-standard given the controversial, provocative, politically motivated tweets by many of the gun control activists that are often promoted and even lauded by local media. On another hand Ryan Petty is running for an elected office. This scrutiny is fair game.
What's Really Wrong With Facebook and How to Fix It Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture
Hot Take: In 2008 banks were too big to fail. In 2018 Facebook's too big to manage. They make money by targeting advertisers at users so they need as many of them as possible. Many of their users share content that might not be widely acceptable to the advertisers, and in many cases is illegal. Everything runs on computers programmed algorithms that are only as objective as the engineers who program them. Every country has different rules and regs and every community has a different standard of acceptability. And that's when there's not a loop hole being exploited on the platform using your information, friends, likes, etc.
Truth is there really isn't a way to "fix" Facebook. Because you can't fix any of those realities. The only question is whether people will continue to use the platform and advertisers will continue to pay to reach them. It's a reminder again about consumer technology. It's the ficklest thing there is this side of teen fashion retail. The consumer internet is 30 years old. The companies behind the first two generations of leading internet technology died out.
Internet service:
Prodigy & AOL
Browsers:
World Wide Web & Netscape
Computers:
Compaq & IBM
Mobile devices (connected pagers):
Motorola & Research in Motion
Smart Phones:
Palm & Blackberry
& how many of the 90's dotcom companies went bust? You get the point. There was MySpace and there's Facebook. History is not on the side of The Facebook. I still say it's 50-50 at best that it still exists with its base product in ten years.
Until Tomorrow...