BBC Launches 'News Control Panel' on Facebook

bbc news control panel

A number of recent studies have shown that social media services like Twitter and Facebook are one of the largest sources of traffic for news sites, and the BBC has now decided to aggressively test the limits of this dynamic by launching the BBC News Control Panel on Facebook.

The Control Panel requires that you first "like" the BBC page on Facebook, after which you are presented with a menu of options that allow you to customize your Facebook news feed by topic, news show, or correspondent.

Explaining the reasoning behind the move, BBC News product manager Gareth Owen said, "Fewer than 50 percent of the 8 million-plus visitors to the News website every day see our front page and the rest arrive directly at a story, video page or section index… Almost a quarter of a million individual users start their BBC News website journey via a link on Facebook every day."

Apparently not everyone is a fan. Not long after the BBC announced the new Facebook feature, several BBC fans voiced some rather strong opposition to the feature.

A BBC user named Chris offered the most detailed critique saying, "Sorry, but while I appreciate that many people come in from Twitter or Facebook, and while I think it is reasonable for the BBC to add sharing buttons and the like, I strongly dislike the idea of the BBC spending its resources building applications specifically to promote a proprietary, privately run platform and one moreover whose revenue comes from attempting to monetise its users personal data and activity records."

For now, the BBC says this is just a beta product, but the execution and ease-of-use of the feature suggests that a lot of thought went into the Control Panel.

A number of news organizations, like the Washington Post and Yahoo News, have launched Facebook-centric apps that allow users to automatically share with their friends the stories they read. Facebook says this is an easy way to keep your friends up-to-date with your interests, though critics have argued that it is ruining sharing.

For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.

Subscribing to a newsletter, constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Subscribing to a newsletter, constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

blog comments powered by Disqus
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401243,00.asp
www.pcmag.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-20
177224
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:KK637BEYVTHISL6IXI24ECWSL7C7E6DU
<urn:uuid:82050204-76aa-4257-9727-5f8e588beb63>
2013-05-21T10:23:48Z
184.51.126.9
sha1:7J3RALEIALL3NTG5FTXWZEN6BIK6NM5E
<urn:uuid:8487e265-1c67-4178-a8b2-ffa194ff0729>
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401243,00.asp
response
<urn:uuid:046f10ac-f5b1-4c36-98c9-d4e0b08dc355>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-20
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Spring 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf