Mashable makes a very simple point that from recent experience I can fully endorse:

I Don’t Want To Consume Media That I Can’t Interact With.

Reading Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death recently I was struck with the number of times I wanted to make a note or comment on the twenty something year old text. I was on a tube/bus/couch at the time and ultimately the moment passed. But with the Kindle, Amazon has the chance to take a huge step here. So far it hasn’t.

The Facebook analogy that follows is even more interesting though. For the average consumer Facebook is the most  interactive social network. Not for Mashable:

It [Facebook] adds no value because I must disrupt my daily routine to interact
with my media. I’m sure that the idea for Facebook is to bring the
world inside it’s walled garden, but that’s just not happening, at the
moment. I can’t blog and reasonably expect to go through my many RSS
feeds and collaboratively edit documents with the team from within
Facebook.
Simply put, Facebook won’t come to me and be interactive, and I
doesn’t have the ability to let me exist completely within it. My
interactions with the web are well documented by my various apps within
Facebook, but it still has very little to offer me that can rival my
toolbox outside the system.

Instead of bridging that functionality gap, Facebook has decided that I
and my offsite actions online have been commoditized for public
consumption and marketing for those that can stay inside the walled garden. Doc Searls says that he can forgive Facebook
for reaching for the brass ring since Project Bacn is the “Holy Grail”;
this to me smacks of appeasement and far too conciliatory. Facebook is
sitting on top of a mountain of data, and while it may not be worth $15
Billion, it sure isn’t worthless either. There are a hundred other ways
to creatively monetize it (to much more accolade in the techosphere).

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