All your friends don’t share any more
In what may be a record breakingly late book review, Mumbrella’s Tim Burrowes re-examines a time when sharing was the lubricant of the news economy.
The cat on the cover: The authors of All Your Friends Like This made a couple of forecasting errors
There is a second hand book site which I adore, but never name in published articles or podcasts.
The prices are reasonable and the library is deep, but slow moving. I fear that if I spread the word amongst the communications world, I’ll create competitors for the cheap treasure I occasionally discover.
For some time, I’ve been trying to tick something off the to-do list. When the team behind Share Wars published “All Your Friends Like This” almost exactly a decade ago, I meant to pick up a copy. Every time I saw it in an airport bookshop, it would nag at me. It was of my world, and written by people I respected but did not know very well back then.
Few people had thought as deeply, or developed as much expertise in what it took to make news go viral within the Facebook feed.
The Facebook algo had de-prioritised news well before the bargaining code
As it turned out the bargaining code needed to be introduced exactly when this book was published, not when the horse had bolted