Facebook's plan for web domination

Facebook wants to take over the news business, said Ravi Somaiya at The New York Times. The social network, with 1.4 billion global users, has "already become a vital source of traffic" for news organizations struggling to make money in the internet age. But Facebook now wants to be more than a middleman. It has been quietly negotiating with several media companies — including BuzzFeed, National Geographic, and The New York Times — about hosting news content "inside" Facebook, so that users wouldn't have to tap often slow-loading links to read or watch an outlet's content. You might ask why news organizations would go along with such a "Faustian bargain," said Will Oremus at Slate. Well, they'd "be foolish not to." Facebook is already the place where many mobile-savvy millennials get their news, and companies that play ball with Facebook's plans will probably enjoy "huge growth" in traffic. Sure, there's a risk news outlets are "mortgaging their long-term futures for short-term gain." But that's a risk many appear willing to take.

News is just the beginning, said Kevin Kelleher at Time. At its developer conference last week, Facebook unveiled several other offerings that suggest its ambitions for web domination go far beyond the media business. Most impressive is a retooled Messenger platform, which is already used by hundreds of millions of people to communicate with friends. Now they can use it to pay and receive money within their network, and to chat with e-commerce sites and other businesses about the status of their online orders. Facebook also rolled out new software for app developers working on "smart" devices, said Ben Popper at The Verge. The software will push data from connected devices like smart locks and lightbulbs "into the social network, so you can be easily notified in your news feed or on Messenger when your garage door opens or your connected flower pot is running out of water."

Clearly, "this isn't your older sister's" social network, said Jon Swartz at USA Today. Over the past three years, Facebook has been on an "acquisition spree," spending $25 billion on more than two dozen companies — including mobile-messaging service WhatsApp, virtual-reality startup Oculus, and photo-sharing app Instagram — in order to transform itself into a "multiplatform social-media powerhouse." It wants to be a "portal or gateway" to users' entire web experience, said Julie Ask at Huffington Post. Look closely, and those acquisitions have simply been "filling in the gaps."

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Watching Facebook debut its new features, I couldn't help but think of AOL, said Owen Williams at The Next Web. Back in the 1990s, that company similarly "fought tooth and nail to contain your internet experience inside its walled garden." But where AOL failed, Facebook might actually succeed. It has a huge audience in the U.S., and in emerging countries it's already practically synonymous with "the internet." If it can become the web gateway it hopes to be, it could soon control "what you see and when" online. Maybe it's just me, but that seems like a "terrifying" amount of power "to put in a single place."