What bloggers need from Facebook
Saturday, April 30, 2016 by Dave Winer

I want to make Facebook into the best blogging platform in the world that has over a billion readers. 

Here's what's needed to make that work and then why it's important.

  1. Links.
  2. Styling -- bold, italic, lists, subheads.
  3. Enclosures -- for podcasting.
  4. Titles -- lots of blog posts have them.


Why it's so important

I cross-post to Facebook and a number of other places. 

Items 1-4 above are important parts of the basic blogging vocabulary.

Because they aren't present in Facebook, my writing can be hard to parse in Facebook. It's as if you left out upper-case letters (in the case of linking, very basic stuff for web-writing) and punctuation and a few special symbols like dollar sign or percent. You could communicate that way, but it would be weird.

With these four features, we'd have a baseline, and I think some very cool stuff would happen both inside Facebook and on the open web. 

This is why I tweeted the other day that silos aren't necessarily bad. If they allow cross-posting to the open web, we get a nice mix of benefits and mutual respect, and hopefully in a couple of years some excitement in the form of new features in the open web. And btw, that's where new features in Facebook come from.


API-only is OK

BTW, as a developer of blogging tools, it's totally okay with me if these features are only available through the API, to keep the FB user interface as simple as possible. Let these features come from advanced tools, and at the same time help build a market for new web writing tools.