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Facebook is the New AOL


I just tried the embed feature of Instagram. Pretty neat, right?

In other news …

For Developing World, a Streamlined Facebook – NYTimes.com:

An Internet marketer in this NYTimes article, where Vindu Goel reports on Facebook getting ready to roll out Facebook for feature phones, said,

In a lot of foreign markets, people think that the Internet is Facebook.

This is exactly what people thought of AOL in the US and even Minitel in France in the mid-`90s. People thought you couldn’t access electronic information on the Web without the blue start-up page (Or was it green?).

In my experience, I eventually figured out that you could open up Netscape and type in web addresses into the address bar. And I immediately chose Yahoo! as my search engine. So began my foray into the great World Wide Web.

For the developing world, using Facebook as one’s portal into the Internet may be an important tool for understanding how to access valuable information outside of Facebook’s sphere of influence. But these new users will eventually phase it out, as I have, and as I phased out my Yahoo homepage sometime in the 2000s.

A link: Alexis Madrigal’s post on how to present the Internet to users.

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