Facebook’s Foray into Audio

Throughout the 2000s media was still in some significant sense balkanized. People did not just consume stories, they visited story sources, and the sources were numerous. Everything from trusted websites associated with legacy media institutions like the New York Times to popular aggregators like Drudge and blogs like the Huffington Post thrived, a... See more

First, phone calls had deeply embedded the idea that audio’s primary role was synchronous, 1-to-1 communication. Second, users can’t skim audio in the same way that they can skim text or quickly glance at images/videos. This made audio a bad match for mass social media where users became used to scrolling through and briefly looking at a large quan... See more