In the (future of) news this week: Facebook, The New York Times, GigaOM, Hasselhoff? nie.mn/yrRbkW
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Nieman Journalism Lab
Nieman Journalism Lab
Pushing to the future of journalism — A project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard

Mark Lazen on the Facebook death watch

In the spirit of Yogi Berra’s “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded,” Mark Lazen of Social Media Today offers a post suggesting that Facebook could become a victim of its own success: “The Facebook death watch begins.“    Lazen writes: “FB’s central paradox is that it is conceived as a network for personal friendships. And despite the wishful thinking of social marketers, friends who are always trying to sell something don’t make the best friends.” He points to the demise of AOL and predicts: “In the next year or so we will see a shift of perception. FB will lose its cache as the single place for social interaction with friends. FB members will begin to slip off into new communities where they can socialize without interruption.”  Lively discussion ensues in the comments.

                                   
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Mark Coddington    February 10, 2012
Plus: Parsing The New York Times’ paywall figures, a big nonprofit news merger in the Bay Area, and all the rest of this week’s news in media and tech.