Wal-Mart and Facebook are synonymous in many things - meth labs in the toilets are like liking the selfies from people's illicit parties and getting killed by police in the aisles for wielding pellet guns is like being the "go-to" place for robbers and murderers to find their victims. Facebook as a Walmart will become America On Line! LoFo Central for the LIVs.
May God bless the convergence of corporate commodities and corporate media.
Facebook is becoming the Wal-Mart for news
As reported in the New York Times, Facebook may start directly hosting the content of various news websites, starting with the New York Times, BuzzFeed and National Geographic. What this means for Internet users is that instead of seeing a summary of an article on Facebook, clicking, reading it on the publisher's website, then coming back to Facebook to discuss the article, you'll just read the whole thing right on Facebook — which will share the advertising revenue it generates from managing the publishers' articles. What this means in the larger sense is that the Internet will become more centralized...
What's novel is that, in Facebook, there is this one truly massive entity several orders of magnitude larger than any other large media company. It's a little like when the Bell System owned all of our phones and lines, and to communicate in America you needed to lease a landline from the phone company. It's also a little like the Apple App Store, where the cost of getting your software onto an iPhone or iPad is going through an Apple approval process and kicking a percentage back to Apple. And this Facebook deal with publishers might also be a little like when Wal-Mart began its massive expansion and began to squeeze its suppliers for every penny. The upside was that Bentonville, Ark., got an airport, China got a lot of manufacturing contracts and Americans got a lot of cheap sneakers and plastic jugs of sweetened tea. The downside was felt by Wal-Mart employees — who are badly paid — and local businesses...
Unless everyone decides to start paying for news again, or advertisers decide that a Web reader on a newspaper's website is as valuable as a print reader, Facebook is going to be a newspaper for millions of people. That's just the reality. The best we can hope for is more transparency — more information about how stories find their way to us, the readers. This would be valuable not simply because the news is, ultimately, a public trust as well as a commercial product, but because Facebook is one too.