Red alert for publishers: Facebook has just acquired Push Pop Press, an ebook publisher and app maker. Stuart over on our Apps Blog has the skinny, but the interesting point here is what this talent-acquisition could point to in Facebook's strategy.
Push Pop Press is a contemporary of social magazine Flipboard. Photo by Johan Larsson on Flickr. Some rights reserved
The talent in question is the two founders, Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris, but looking through their past work gives an intriguing hint to the influence they might have at Facebook on storytelling. As they say in their farewell statement on the Push Pop Press site: "Now we're taking our publishing technology and everything we've learned and are setting off to help design the world's largest book, Facebook."
In an earlier interview with the Apps Blog, Tsinteris explained how Push Pop Press aimed to reimagine the book using the interactivity made possible by apps.
"We really focused on... the relationship between the viewer and the content. After that, social is a great way to let those viewers share the content with their friends. We see social as the next step on top of a great interactive consumer experience."
Our Choice, the app Push Pop Press made for Al Gore as the ebook version of his sequel for An Inconvenient Truth, is a truly phat app and one that has taken a huge amount of material - text, some glorious images and video - and, particularly on iPad, made them navigable in a compelling way that doesn't feel overwhelming, despite the volume of content.
Matas runs through the Our Choice app in this Ted talk from earlier this year.
Assuming their skills will be used beyond a kick-ass Facebook app itself, applying those kind of principles and aesthetics to Facebook starts to get very interesting. There have been limited experiments with presentation on Facebook; a few amateur photographers played with the new profile layout introduced late last year, and some photojournalists have tried storytelling on Facebook - see the Basetrack project.
Public 'Facebook Pages' intended for brands or organisations can be seen by anyone, as opposed to personal profile pages for individuals where readers would (usually) need to be a friend to get full access.
But the dynamics aren't really set up for storytelling, or even selecting the best content. There are virtually no design options (come back MySpace, with your creaky skin-HTML-pasted-into-the-body-field workarounds), so no way of designing to suit your project, limited ways of flagging up older content and crucially, no way of reorganising content like photos, which means it's not possible to favourite or filter. Tags only extend to people with Facebook profiles.
What would Facebook need to offer truly comprehensive storytelling tools? Look at our Vimeo story this week on how the video site fenced off an artier audience and better quality content by offering slick, design focused tools. Facebook's interface is, understandably, designed to be as simple and consistent as possible when handling such a large volume of data. Compromising some of that to offer more flexible, creative tools for audio slideshows, variable photo and video sizes, and perhaps skins that allow stronger identities for projects is an exciting project, but one that could have implications for news publishers.
Facebook would never pretend to be anything other than an engineering company (and a look through the quality of the photos its users typically upload would confirm the priority is quantity over quality) but if Facebook could start to get serious about an interface that provided creative tools, from ecard makers and light video editing for consumers to a customisable, magazine-style layout for professional publishers. Think of a Storify-style interface even.
No-one is suggesting that Facebook is about to start publishing ebooks, but with expertise like Push Pop Press coming on board, significant foundations for public-facing journalists' pages described as 'a social newspaper' already established, and a vast global audience... publishers shouldn't take this one lying down.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/aug/03/facebook-push-pop-press-ebooks
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