ABC News partners with Facebook

As traditional media outlets get more and more het up about this internet fad that’s stealing all their readers and viewers, ABC News has decided to do something about it. Today marks the launch of the ABC Facebook platform, US Politics. 

You would not expect one of these fearful media giants to have embraced the internet so wholeheartedly, but it’s obvious, browsing through the application, that ABC News hired good people to create their Facebook presence. 

For one thing, they’ve cottoned on to an important fact: both Facebook users and voters care about what everyone else is doing. Thus, when you pick which politicians you support on the application, you also have the option of seeing who your friends support. Although they do include a polling section which maps out who Facebook users are supporting and it doesn’t seem to entirely mesh with the real world as laid out in Gallup polls. Kucinich has a much higher percentage of support than I think he’ll have on election day, for example. On the other hand, the graph doesn’t include Stephen Colbert at all. 

I also give this application big points for including a voter registration link on the home page, and a way to remind your friends to register. In addition, the page offers headlines and video news and mini-feeds from the reporters and politicians you’re following. 

Now, to the problems. At present there are still some kinks to be worked out. The sorting function to choose politicians and reporters has some broken fields, and some fields that only have one choice in them. (Interestingly, there’s a field to sort reporters by network. At present only ABC reporters are on the list, but it suggests they’ll be adding external reporters as well at some point.) 

A bigger problem for me is that the “debate groups” are actually just multiple-choice surveys about hot-button issues. I love graphical data representation as much as the next girl, but ABC needs to remember that people love the internets because the internets allow us have our say. Unlike, say, watching ABC News, where we are a passive audience. This is the biggest flag that this application was created by traditional media. A few bulletin boards or chat rooms would be easy to add, and a couple of moderators don’t cost much. Otherwise, ABC is going to find Fox News coming in with their own application that lets thirteen year olds actually do all the reporting and pretty soon it’ll be “ABC who?”

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