If Facebook is serious about becoming the social index for the entire web, it needs to do more not to just export social networking functionality but to make Facebook itself a more hospitable place for outside web page content to live.

For years people have been lamenting the death of newspapers—and have been offering all sorts of fixes to save them, from changing the copyright laws to keep online aggregators from rebroadcasting the news to encouraging newspapers to adopt the not-for-profit model.

Apps have become tokens of the future. Publishers need to become inventors of everyday science fiction.

Media companies are in a tough spot because creating compelling content demands a lot more subtlety than promoting products. To engage teens rather than merely influencing them you have to get down to the feelings teens share and understand the way they respond to the world.

The hottest media trend in the last few years has been the explosion of hyperlocal content—it has become clear that the masses cared most about themselves and their surroundings.

There’s a lot of talk about teens being “digital natives” because they text obsessively, play video games, and spend hours online. But for teens technology is just another way to maximize their social connections. There’s a lot of talk about teens being “digital natives” because they text obsessively, play video games, and spend hours online

Media companies are simulating Google’s startup culture by experimenting in various ways. Some study consumer preferences to aid product development, others run competitions for new ideas. 

The media industry is undergoing a seismic shift. In the U.S. newspaper advertising revenue plummeted 46 percent while European companies found new models by adding clubs and commerce. 

In real life we jump through hoops for friendship. Facebook makes it too easy. So what real life has, and which Facebook doesn’t have, are barriers to building a friendship. 

Just this year, Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, that using a fake handle online was an example of a “lack of integrity.” In this new social graph, the use of your real ID online has apparently become an issue of moral uprightness — after all, don’t we all want accountability and reliability for every citizen of the social graph?

A more interesting question is whether people are using the social Web the way its designers think they are — and should they be allowed to? For social scientists this is a fun phenotypical question: Give humans a tool and watch it engender all sorts of odd behavior.