A longread on AOL-VZ and Facebook’s Instant Articles, which I find extremely interesting:
Moreover, there is a very real culture question: an infrastructure company and an online media company couldn’t have more different approaches to business, based on a history of solving fundamentally different problems. This clash will only compound the difficulty in realizing the vision I just painted — a vision that Facebook and Google have still only partially realized despite having the best software engineers in the world.
Ultimately, I think this deal boils down to VZ’s attempted end around their privacy issues:
And, of course, there is the potential for consumer backlash: if my skin crawled while describing a dystopian future of perfectly tailored ads based on perfect information about my activities, I trust your reading it inspired a similar sensation.
One thing I do believe is that deterministic trumps predictive models. The question is really about navigating the privacy issue.
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