Facebook, the social-networking site popular with college students, has recently begun allowing outside companies to develop widgets and other programs that the site will support. Facebook subscribers can download them for use on their personal pages. Blogger Paul Conley says this may cause a shift in the way many companies do business because this will invite other social-networking sites and work-networking sites to do the same. In the future, online companies may look to piggyback on other Web sites to create a clientele and a niche. To those in the media, it may make sense to take a page out of the business model of Facebook. For example, allowing a YouTube-type program on the news outlet's Web site would allow people to make video responses to the news. This could generate interest in a generation that seems to embrace the idea of making public commentary on things. There are a million directions this could go, but it seems to me that anything that gets people more involved personally in the news is a good idea. This would give the media a chance to move their public-forum function into the next phase of technology. The greatest task, I think, would be to mediate the responses for inappropriate content.
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