I've been reading about this and will be watching it carefully.
I attempted to develop and market an online system to newspapers and magazines just a couple of years ago. We developed this fun, useful application for a key demographic and they could market the service on their sites.
One of the major problem we ran into was the publishers wanted to do it themselves. I heard that time and again. They didn't want to be owned by us if it really took off. So they did nothing.
Heaven knows something needs to be done about the "comments" section most local newspapers. And YouTube could stand to be cleaned up as well. (Now that I think about, only this board here doesn't have a severe problem. Ha.)
So, it will be interesting. Yes, their product would be better. Yes, it would link into more people. But, they'll have to share control.
One of the key reasons we wanted to work with publishers was to bring audience to our service. And, in the bar in restaurants I was told by other that, if we had a million users already, the publisher might talk to us. But, that really never came up. Fact is, no one asked to see our stats.
So, perhaps the FB audience will be appealing. Or perhaps the industry will mature. Well, ok,... more the former than the latter is likely if this takes off.
