Facebook Tests the Waters With Paid Perks

CNET reports that Facebook has experimented lately with a small group of users by offering people the chance to promote their own account status messages the old-fashioned way: by paying for them. The author of the linked article asks whether it's inevitable that "Facebook will have to start dinging users in earnest," post-IPO. Facebook still says "It's free and always will be," but that doesn't rule out paying for additional features — that's certainly a model that many game makers had adopted.

Comments

Freemium at its best

[manekineko2]

So first Facebook's algorithm hides my posts from my friends for reasons known only to Facebook.

Now Facebook is testing the option so I can pay so that my posts they hid will actually show to my friends.

In a way, I really hope Facebook goes through with this, maybe it'll be the straw that finally breaks the camels back and we can get a new social network that actually cares about its users.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

So first Facebook's algorithm hides my posts from my friends for reasons known only to Facebook.

You're doing it wrong.

Now Facebook is testing the option so I can pay so that my posts they hid will actually show to my friends.

No, it allows you to pay for premium space - you know, like advertisers do - most people won't want to do that though.

In a way, I really hope Facebook goes through with this, maybe it'll be the straw that finally breaks the camels back and we can get a new social network that actually cares about its users.

You really think everyone is just going to transition to some other social network because of this? Only a vocal minority really gives 2 shits about all of the 'evil' of corporations like Facebook and Google and Microsoft and Apple, to the degree that they would be willing to change products, it's pretty naive to think otherwise.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a heads-up. Your post that aren't showing up -- that's because your friends asked facebook to stop showing them. Then when you noticed they were like, "I don't know, why didn't see it? Oh man, facebook is so weird. Hiding stuff for _NO REASON_"

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

I have several former coworkers that now work for Facebook. The fact that the vast majority of posts you would find interesting are now hidden is a bug with their new sorting algorithm. They're still working on it. For now, one friend recommended using the old "Most Recent" feature instead of the broken "Top Stories" feature. My feed is 90+% Cityville crap even though I have the game blocked.

I know how frustrating it is. I posted a story a couple of weeks ago that I was going to be in the hospital for nearly a week for emergency surgery. Not a single person I've talked to since then saw the post. It was depressing thinking no one cared when in reality no one knew.

Re:Freemium at its best

[ThePeices]

Why wait?

I ditched Facebook early this year, and havent looked back.

Reading posts like this reinforces my decision.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you're being fooled. The OP is either a troll or a fool. I haven't seen this problem on FB.
 
Of course, that won't stop you from going out and professing that it's the truth of god or anything.

Re:Freemium at its best

[flibbidyfloo]

Hahaha! There will never be a social network that "cares about its users" more than it cares about money. Unless it's founded by the FOSS movement. How many people are using Diaspora again?

Re:Freemium at its best

[isopropanol]

Shows all posts (by people facebook has decided you "interact with") you mean?

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Have a Facebook Profile

Re:Freemium at its best

[__aaltlg1547]

Hahaha! There will never be a social network that "cares about its users" more than it cares about money. Unless it's founded by the FOSS movement. How many people are using Diaspora again?

But the FOSS movement cares more about ideology than users...

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now Facebook is testing the option so I can pay so that my posts they hid will actually show to my friends."

Nice posts you have here, it would be a shame if something happened to them.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

Like unity/gnome.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, no. I don't see things that my wife posts. She'll be sitting at the desk next to mine and tell me she posted some pictures or whatever and there will be nothing in my feed. I can wait a while and refresh the feed and still nothing. If I go to her profile, there they are. I have no idea why this happens. and it happens seemingly at random with only some of her posts. It's hard to check if it happens with everyone, since I only have a few Facebook friends and it's not like I'm regularly checking their profiles to see if they've posted other things I don't see. I'm subscribed to "All Updates".

Re:Freemium at its best

[rgbrenner]

"cares about it's users"? Are you kidding me? Do you know how much it costs to run facebook? For bandwidth, servers, electricity, etc for 900 million users?

$600 million for equipment in 2011, and another $500 million this year. (source)

That's just for equipment. Plus you have to pay for developers, server admins, office space, etc, etc, etc.

Anyone who thinks they are going to start a service to replace facebook without making money their #1 priority is an idiot who will fail the moment they have to open a hundred million $ data center.

Re:Freemium at its best

[timeOday]

And yet, there is craigslist. No I'm not saying it's an alternative to facebook, I'm pointing out how amazingly user-centered it has remained. In fact "earnest" might even be a better word. Thank you Craig Newmark.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not disable the broken feature while it is being fixed?

Re:Freemium at its best

[Culture20]

It started about a couple years ago, I missed some big announcements from close friends, and found out that FB started limiting the news feed to only certain friends' statuses. There was temporarily an option to expand it to everyone again, but that disappeared more than a year ago to. Now if you're narcissistic enough, you can ensure that your friends see your status message. FB will cease to become a source of communication soon because people like free, but they like free+works better, and there are other free communication methods that don't arbitrarily drop your messages and offer to charge you to resend them.

Re:Freemium at its best

[advocate_one]

the problem there is that you posted it as a status post... if you'd really wanted to get their attention, you should have sent it as a message instead...

Re:Freemium at its best

[Sir_Sri]

And, inevitably, if you want a business that can sustain itself it needs revenue. If you don't pay for it, advertisers are paying and you're actually the product.

As sad as it is, facebook would probably have to be a whole lot more honest and respectful of your data if they charged you to use their service than when they're trying to eek out every penny of advertising dollars.

Facebook sustains itself because users are too cheap to cough up cash up front (and probably legitimately too skeptical of any new social network getting their CC info), and if it's free why would you change to someone else who is also free? As you correctly say, only a small minority cares or understands the 'evil' corporations and their TOS's.

If Apple made the next social network it *might* have a chance, apparently steve jobs reality distortion bubble is persisting through death. People still think of of Microsoft as BSOD windows 95, and blame them for their shitty computers with shitty software they installed running windows poorly, so microsoft can't do it. Google tried and failed, because google plus doesn't really offer anything worth switching over. So who are the 'internet' or technology companies going to fill this niche facebook has? They'll have to do something monstrous to the page (myspace) for people to flee to a simpler product, who would have to be free, because no one is going to give a new company their CC info. And if they're free, they'll do exactly the same thing facebook does with your data, sell it to the highest bidder, lowest bidder, and all other bidders.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

You could have sent an email to a bunch of people. I hear that works.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Anyone who thinks they are going to start a service to replace facebook without making money their #1 priority is an idiot who will fail the moment they have to open a hundred million $ data center.

That is only true if the idea is to replace facebook with a facebook clone. That will never happen.

What could happen is a distributed social network. One of the most common effects of the internet has been disintermediation. The thing is that facebook itself is ripe for disintermediation - it has set itself up as the intermediary for hundreds of millions of people. But we don't need facebook to get between us and our friends.

I expect to see facebook left in the dustbin of internet history by software that runs mostly on our phones. It won't be much longer until phones will have terabytes of storage and constant high-bandwidth connections - even with cell tower bandwidth at such a premium, most people are within the range of a friendly wifi hotspot for the majority of their day. The need for centralization is practically over with already. You can host your "wall" and your photo albums and whatever other media you want directly on your phone and you'll get 100% of what makes facebook valuable to 99% of its users without all of the pandering to Big Data's stalking addiction.

All it is going to take is a good quality phone-centric social network app and facebook will shrivel up and blow the way of myspace and geocities.

Re:Freemium at its best

[devphaeton]

So first Facebook's algorithm hides my posts from my friends for reasons known only to Facebook.

Now Facebook is testing the option so I can pay so that my posts they hid will actually show to my friends.

In a way, I really hope Facebook goes through with this, maybe it'll be the straw that finally breaks the camels back and we can get a new social network that actually cares about its users.

While I agree that the new features are silly and a thinly veiled attempt at capitalizing upon the public, shall we all remember that when we post things on Facebook, we are voluntarily using a free service on the Internet? At any point we are all free to delete our account, ignore the parts we don't like, or otherwise not participate in it as a social networking site.

Shit, we may even decide to go outside, into the Big Blue Room and talk to actual people, face to face!

Re:Freemium at its best

[black6host]

I know how frustrating it is. I posted a story a couple of weeks ago that I was going to be in the hospital for nearly a week for emergency surgery. Not a single person I've talked to since then saw the post. It was depressing thinking no one cared when in reality no one knew.

Sorry you had to go through that. Honestly. But you know what? If I went into the hospital for emergency surgery anyone I wanted to know would know. I don't have a facebook account. And I'd never create one and expect it to act as a tool to disseminate critical information. It was important to you that people knew but you relied on a mechanism that is geared towards monetizing you and if it works for you all the better. If it doesn't, oh well. Not like you can sue them over it.

I'm not trying to be harsh, and I do feel for you. Next time, use the phone (you had time to post to facebook, all it takes is one phone call to spread the word....)

Re:Freemium at its best

[MiG82au]

The old "I haven't seen it, so it's false". Nice. I subscribed to all, and wondered why I see so few active people on FB. Surely they aren't all just lurking? Nope, going to their wall shows they have said many things I have not seen (I look multiple times per day). But hey, I must be imagining it because you haven't seen it.

Re:Freemium at its best

[wvmarle]

Probably there will be something new sooner or later, but centralised systems like Facebook have advantages.

Availability of content. You're not leaving your phone on all the time, and I'm not sure how fast your upload is, nor about your data limits. And that's assuming you have a smartphone and that you have a data connection with it. Having it on a centralised server negates these issues: always available, always fast. Reliability of an organised centrailised system is better than that of a disorganised decentralised system. Especially when those centralised system spreads out over multiple locations/networks like Facebook and other big providers already do.

Sending messages: an intermediate is almost a must, when the clients are not sure to be online all the time. You can post messages, leave them on the central server, and recipient can read them sometime later.

Contact management, searching for friends, etc: we all know how well search works on a fully decentralised system like Gnutella. Without centralised index search just doesn't scale well.

I'd like to know how current Facebook can be done with a fully decentralised system. The "likes", the news feed with updates from friends who may or may not be online right then, etc.

Re:Freemium at its best

[XahXhaX]

Just imagine how bad it must have been before there was a Facebook, and there was no way to let another person know about such important news and emergencies!

Re:Freemium at its best

[Pieroxy]

Shit, we may even decide to go outside, into the Big Blue Room and talk to actual people, face to face!

WTF is wrong with you people? You still think Facebook is here to replace something like going out? Do you really believe all facebook users forgot to open their front door for the last year?

You see no value in facebook, we get it. Now fuck off and let us use it the way we see fit, unless you feel empowered by God to forbid us to do so.

That's part of respecting others - not trying to force feed them with *your* view of how they should behave.

Re:Freemium at its best

[stephanruby]

That's it! You just ruined it for the rest of us. Why did you have to tell him?

Re:Freemium at its best

[marcello_dl]

> we can build a new social network that actually cares about its users.

there, FTFY

The best social network i came across was called the internet, IIRC it was version 1.0

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

This is precisely the reason facebook is crap. It pretends to be about communication, as a 'tool' to use to spread the word. Then when it doesn't work people like you say 'well what do you expect': Well I'd expect it to work!

But you're right, other methods are better, and the people that matter should know another way, which is another reason FB is crap because it replaces good communication with bad.

Re:Freemium at its best

[rtb61]

Ohh Crap!

There will be a massive push to drive up Facebooks income by any means possible to ramp up the valuation of the company regardless of the consequences. Choke the chicken too hard and it never comes it just dies.

That's exactly what is, repeat, is going to happen. They will use Facebook shares as junk bonds to buy in revenue by buying other tech companies and then market that as increased revenue, they will add new charges everywhere they can think of and they will push against people's addiction to facebook. They will do everything in their power to create a Facebook fiscal bubble.

We are talking Goldman 'we don't give a crap show me the money now' Sachs. All they need is one year pump and dump and kaboom, the pension funds get stuck with another lemon.

Re:Freemium at its best

[moozey]

Ah, yep, gotcha. I remember when they rolled out that feature and I also managed to change it back via certain settings. I didn't realise they'd made it a permanent feature now though. Spewin'!

Re:Freemium at its best

[fa2k]

I know how frustrating it is. I posted a story a couple of weeks ago that I was going to be in the hospital for nearly a week for emergency surgery. Not a single person I've talked to since then saw the post. It was depressing thinking no one cared when in reality no one knew.

It was important to you that people knew but you relied on a mechanism that is geared towards monetizing you and if it works for you all the better. If it doesn't, oh well. Not like you can sue them over it.

Heh, maybe you can sue then if you payed them (like in the story)

Re:Freemium at its best

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Availability of content. You're not leaving your phone on all the time, and I'm not sure how fast your upload is, nor about your data limits. And that's assuming you have a smartphone and that you have a data connection with it.

Your premise is something I addressed in my original post - most people are within wifi range most of the time so data limits are only applicable to "life-line" situations. Even today, over 100 million US residents own smartphones. I don't think it is a stretch to say that once you eliminate people who don't use social networking, that 100+ million smartphone users starts to look like at least 75% of the remaining population and those numbers will only increase as time passes.

Contact management, searching for friends, etc: we all know how well search works on a fully decentralised system like Gnutella. Without centralised index search just doesn't scale well.

Searching on gnutella is far more common than searching on facebook. The entire point of gnutella is to find new stuff. The entire point of facebook is to communicate with people you have already found. So what if a DHT is less efficient than a centralized search? People don't search enough on facebook for it to be a significant factor. But even then, given the six degrees rule a DHT that mimics social circles would probably be just as fast as a centralized search engine for more than 99% of searches.

I'd like to know how current Facebook can be done with a fully decentralised system. The "likes", the news feed with updates from friends who may or may not be online right then, etc.

Social networking is not a hard real-time system. It is no big deal if news feed updates take a couple of hours in the case where both end-points aren't online simultaneously - after all if they aren't online it doesn't really matter if facebook is instantaneous or not either since being offline means you can't read the update regardless of centralization.

And for those rare cases where a user is only online for very limited amounts of time? Let their social circle cache their information, so that as long as any one friend is online to receive an update, anyone else can come along and pull that same information from the friend instead of directly from the source.

Re:Freemium at its best

[VortexCortex]

> 2012
> Still not being able to easily leverage tech for simple things.
Screw 3rd party Data Silos. You only use them because utilising your tech hasn't been made easy enough yet. As a coder I feel partly responsible, and am working to fix this as one of my life's goals...

If only giving freedoms and removing limitations was as profitable as imposing limits and removing capabilities.

Re:Freemium at its best

[MartinG]

Facebook DOES care about it's users.

It's users (i,e, the customers) are the advertisers. You people are not the customers, you're the product.

Enabling payment like this means suddenly you are the customer too, and maybe they might care about you.

If you don't like this model, you picked the wrong social network.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you check in that "awesome" new friend feed or whatever the heck it's called in the upper right corner of Facebook? It seems that's where you see *all* updates, where as the main "normal" section picks just certain things to show

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook makes money as does google, the problem here is that facebook is valuated so far out of what anyone would expect from their revenue, that they have to find someway of printing money with a unrealistic profit marging and that's where things tend to blow up.

Remember AOL, Myspace, ICQ, MSN etc, they all had a huge userbase, were seen as invincible and they all more or less crashed when they tried to cash in in a market where they were no longer the leaders in innovation.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's because your wife changed her settings when she started having that affair ;)

It's also probably because you haven't worked out how to change your subscription to your friends. You can choose if Facebook shows you everything from a person, just popular posts from them or nothing at all. You do this on their profile page. So yes, your friends really did set you to ignore :P

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

You really think everyone is just going to transition to some other social network because of this? .

You're right. After all, everyone is still using AIM....

Just because people use a thing doesn't mean they always will.

Re:Freemium at its best

[WrongSizeGlass]

A T T E N T I O N ! ! ! !

Regarding your post about Craig's List. Your account has been suspended

To make corrective actions you M U S T login to your account for not to be continued suspended.


If your think this is an error contact us to not you're account continue to be suspend.

Re:Freemium at its best

[AngryDeuce]

Remember AOL, Myspace, ICQ, MSN etc, they all had a huge userbase, were seen as invincible and they all more or less crashed when they tried to cash in in a market where they were no longer the leaders in innovation.

The mob is fickle, brother. Ten years ago Myspace didn't even exist yet, and it hasn't been relevant in years now. C'est la vie...

Anyone that expects different with Facebook is delusional. I would honestly not be surprised if a full third of the user accounts on Facebook are either abandoned completely or aren't accessed but a few times a month at the most. I don't know what's going to be the dominant social network in 5 years...but I seriously doubt it's going to be Facebook.

Re:Freemium at its best

[AngryDeuce]

Oh man, but that's so much work, logging into your email account and, uh....look, fuck you buddy. We need to use Facebook! We must use it for everything!!!!! I don't even remember how to dial a phone anymore it's been so long! What are these numbers, and how do you dial someone's Facebook account?!?!! DURRRRRRRRRRR

Re:Freemium at its best

[sociocapitalist]

A social network is for being social. Posting an update that one is in hospital, with the hope of hearing some nice things from one's friends and family is a social activity whether you yourself would do so or not. Sure it isn't the only mechanism to disseminate information but it is a mechanism that people can reasonably expect should work on the largest social networking provider in existence at the moment.

Re:Freemium at its best

[AngryDeuce]

It really is liberating. I realized that the frequency of a person's posts on Facebook was inversely proportional to whether they were actually worth reading long ago.

Although, in the interests of full disclosure, I've always thought social networking was fucking retarded. I never join them of my own volition, it's always after a ton of family and friends harasses the shit out of me about my lack of an account, and then when I finally do sign up, I lose interest within days. Funny considering I can lurk here on slashdot everyday and not (usually) get bored with it, though. Must be the anonymity...

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

You could just talk to her, rather than go through Facebook! :-)

Re:Freemium at its best

[teknopurge]

You get what you pay for. Facebook has no SLA and has no obligation to provide you service at any level.

Re:Freemium at its best

[rgbrenner]

Yes, you're right: if a facebook replacement is completely different than everything in the past 20 years, then it might not require more computing power.

Of course, the trend over the last 20 years has been MORE computing power for everything...

Re:Freemium at its best

[rgbrenner]

Facebook is MORE efficient than Craigslist. Craigslist has 28 employees serving 1 billion pages/month.

Facebook has 3500 employees serving 1 trillion pages/month

Craigslist: 35.7 million pages/employee
Facebook: 285.7 million pages/employee

So how does that contradict my point? Huge websites are not free or cheap.

Re:Freemium at its best

[wvmarle]

Searching on gnutella is far more common than searching on facebook.

The vast majority of searches for Facebook you don't see as they are db calls: every single item in your news feed, every single comment on those items, who liked them, etc: that are all searches. And that's going to take a hell of a long time to collect over such a network. It's not even a search for a specific item like a file name; it's a database query that has to be handled and interpreted by every single node.

And trust me: for many people it matters a lot whether it's near real time as it's now, vs. hours of delay. Look at all those "on the way for lunch, wanna join?" type of status updates: those rely on near real-time communication. Also the chat-like use of the comments on items requires these fast updates. Same for requesting the other 10 comments on an item - only the latest few (are they the latest? or are there more in the hours-long pipeline?) are shown normally.

The speed of getting info from your friends is what keeps people addicted, which is why they're interested to have it on mobile to begin with: see who just updated stuff, who just commented to their status updates, whatever. Take away that speed, and it's over and done with.

I'm one of those users using desktop computer only for accessing facebook; I don't have mobile data on my phone. Yet as soon as it would start taking hours for data to reach me, I'd be gone, and so would many if not all of my friends, to look for something that actually works.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Baloroth]

Indeed. But if it doesn't work, no one has any obligation or reason to use it, so in other words, they very much do have an obligation to work and provide the expected service, or go the way of Myspace.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh man, but that's so much work, logging into your email account and, uh....look, fuck you buddy. We need to use Facebook! We must use it for everything!!!!! I don't even remember how to dial a phone anymore it's been so long! What are these numbers, and how do you dial someone's Facebook account?!?!! DURRRRRRRRRRR

hear hear, I don't even know how to operate the telex anymore, let alone this newfangled telefax thing. How dare they keep changing ways to communicate.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Surt]

I think that's the point of the whole thread. Facebook is already headed the way of Myspace. Seriously. All but about 10% of the people I know have abandoned facebook already. Sure, they still have accounts, but no one is posting there anymore, and they're only checking for activity ~monthly.

Re:Freemium at its best

[ceoyoyo]

Silly? I think it's awesome. So long as there's some way to identify the paid for posts so we can tell who's narcissistic enough to actually pay for it. Then ridicule them.

Re:Freemium at its best

[RodBee]

I don't know about you, but before Facebook, MySpace (and in some places, Orkut) were a thing. People move from social networks all the time, for one they consider "better" for whatever reasons they find. Facebook eventually will be dropped for something else, yes, and actually I have no means to predict when. This just seems to "happen" to me.

Re:Freemium at its best

[baKanale]

Are you sorting your news feed by "Most Recent" or "Top Stories"? For me "Top Stories" means the same five people's crap keeps showing up, to the exclusion of anything newer by anyone else. Last I checked there's no setting to default to "Most Recent", so I need to remember to manually change it every time I go to my feed page.

Re:Freemium at its best

[baenpb]

Agree. You might notice that only posts from a select few people are showing up in your stream, and you seem to see the same people repeatedly. That's not an accident on facebook's part, but I still don't understand why.

Re:Freemium at its best

[timeOday]

Those are interesting stats, and I would never claim running a huge website was cheap or free. But you argued that a large site must place making money as their #1 priority, but that's not consistent with craiglist's website design, business practices, and public statements:

CEO Jim Buckmaster, who is about to celebrate his 11th year in charge, told the Guardian,"any extra profit accrued is an unintended secondary consequence." The 11th most popular site in the United States and the 37th in the world has only 32 employees. It charges for job advertisements in 18 U.S. cities and $10 for apartment listings in New York as a way to meet expenses. AIM estimated the site's value at $1 billion, citing "untapped" commercial potential.

They would not have $1BN of untapped potential (i.e. unused ad real estate on their website) if their true motive were some version of "maximize shareholder value."

Re:Freemium at its best

[cpu6502]

Here's what I expect will happen:

The TV and radio and local businesses I have "friended" will start paying to put their statuses on top of my friends' statuses. Eventually I'll have to unfriend these paying businesses, in order to see what's going on with the friend updates.

Re:Freemium at its best

[rgbrenner]

Well they can say that, but they generate around $100 million/yr in revenue. Compared to other internet companies, a value of 10x revenue isn't all that high. So they don't really have 1bn of untapped potential -- $100 million may be all that they can extract with that level of traffic.

For comparison, facebook had 1.1b in revenue last quarter (so lets say 4.4b/year).. and it's worth upwards of 100b.. which is 22.7x revenue.

So if that's the measure, then facebook is leaving MORE money on the table than Craigslist.

Re:Freemium at its best

[BertieBaggio]

Choke the chicken too hard

i have that dvd

Re:Freemium at its best

[SomePgmr]

I think Facebook would say that status updates are not for important, nobody-can-miss-this type messages. For that they'd want you to use the facebook messages, because those always go through to specific people (or whole list, I think). Status updates are more of the, "i have to take a crap right now", "i'm taking a crap right now", "i'm glad I took that crap earlier, now I can go back to watching tv". So... more like twitter, less like email.

Though I do understand your frustration. I've been a little aggravated that I missed a status update about something important.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Culture20]

Originally, status updates were for anything, up to and including "Hey, this is Jim. I'm using Megan's account because she's in the hospital. Call us there at 555-5555 for details", and everyone who was friends with Megan would see the status. Now it's a shot in the dark.

Re:Freemium at its best

[zlives]

+1

Re:Freemium at its best

[SomePgmr]

Yeah, and people still use it that way... hence the issues. I'm sure it has everything to do with them trying to grab the kind of activity that was moving off to Twitter. I'm sure they thought they were improving on the twitter experience by narrowing down what you see.

Anyway, they obviously want to be everything to everyone... unsatisfied with the idea of having people use Facebook for most things, and Flikr, Twitter, Twitpic, etc. for everything else. They want you to do everything in their garden.

My bells and whistles go off over that kind of thing... but I'd guess I'm a little more paranoid than their average user.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe your wife is "sharing updates" with more than just you, and has set her own outgoing feed to hide them from you. It happens. Not to say you shouldn't, like, trust her, and stuff.

Re:Freemium at its best

[HapSlappy_2222]

I'm grumpy today so I am going to tease you.

It was depressing thinking no one cared when in reality no one knew.

These are not mutually exclusive.

I hope the surgery was successful, though. :)

Re:Freemium at its best

[Sir_Sri]

That was sort of my point. No big company other than apple has the clout to make a social network, and that would probably bomb with all of the apple haters. A small startup isn't going to do things any differently than facebook would. Sure, they'll start free and all private etc. Then they'll need money.

I would expect facebook to be here in 5 years. They're big enough, have enough revenue and enough momentum that they'd need to really screw up to lose their customer base. Google is still around despite the fact that their main revenue stream is polluted by SEO constantly, and they've got their paws into a lot of different areas.

Facebook needs something it can sell that isn't advertising. That might be an 'app store', that might be cloud or webpage services (think amazons cloud) or who knows what. If they aren't selling technology then they're a glorified newspaper, which is fine, there's a place for those and that kind of revenue, but 100 billion dollars is a bit much then. Granted, if facebook was being valued at 10 billion dollars total I think we'd all figure that's a lot more reasonable, so it's all a matter of degree.

Re:Freemium at its best

[marcosdumay]

...and we can get a new social network that actually cares about its users.

And that, people, is how you recgnize a dreamer.

Sorry, but if the users don't care about themselves, why would a company? The only way we can get a social network that cares about its users (in the way we care about people, not in the way we care about cows) is if we take the profits out of the equation, and do it ourselves. Yet, our stereotyped grandmother isn't simply going to do it.

Re:Freemium at its best

[marcosdumay]

No, it allows you to pay for premium space - you know, like advertisers do - most people won't want to do that though.

Yep, most people won't care to use it. Except for spammers.

You really think everyone is just going to transition to some other social network because of this?

That was my first tought... That yes, people are going to switch just because of this.

Social networks live at a thin line; put too much info on the face of its users, and it is useless; put too little info on the face of its users, and it is useless. Make a single change that encourages spam, and you can be shot out of your previous equilibrium into uncharted territory.

Re:Freemium at its best

[marcosdumay]

The world become a better place since that kind of people stopped sending things through email. Now Facebook will ruin it all.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Githaron]

You could have sent an email to a bunch of people. I hear that works.

I doubt a nice chunk of the people I know even use personal email on a regular basis. I used to go several days to over a week between email logins. Now that I have a smartphone, I see my emails as they come in.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

Pot, meet kettle...

Re:Freemium at its best

[Githaron]

Just imagine how bad it must have been before there was a Facebook, and there was no way to let another person know about such important news and emergencies!

In comparison to Facebook and possibly group email, the other methods were vastly inefficient when trying to reach a large group of people. Each communication technology has a place. I wouldn't use Facebook for highly private/sensitive communication but it does have its uses.

Re:Freemium at its best

[sociocapitalist]

Obligation is one thing...expectation is something altogether different.

You're completely right that they have no obligation but that doesn't mean at all that people won't have expectations from them.

Re:Freemium at its best

[cpu6502]

>>>Facebook's algorithm hides my posts from my friends for reasons known only to Facebook

Yes. Here's what I expect will happen:

The TV and Radio and businesses I have "friended" will start paying to make sure their statuses are always visible (and on top). Eventually I'll have to unfriend these paying businesses, in order to see what's going on with the friend updates.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Johann Lau]

You see no value in facebook, we get it. Now fuck off and let us use it the way we see fit, unless you feel empowered by God to forbid us to do so.

That's part of respecting others - not trying to force feed them with *your* view of how they should behave.

I love how you barge into a conversation on slashdot of two people who don't like facebook, and don't consider that "force feeding" at all.

More importantly, respect is earned. Sure you don't tell people who you respect how to behave -- but you also don't respect people all that much who do or fall for certain things. You can "demand respect" all you want, and it's mighty cute; but this isn't even about you, but about the dick you're sucking. Just step aside or something ^^

Re:Freemium at its best

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The vast majority of searches for Facebook you don't see as they are db calls: every single item in your news feed, every single comment on those items, who liked them, etc: that are all searches. And that's going to take a hell of a long time to collect over such a network.

Don't fool yourself by overloading the term "search,." All the stuff you are talking about is nothing more complicated than checking a queue. Faceook is not doing a global search, it is simply checking the "output queues" of known friends.

Ain't no reason a distrbuted system can't do exactly the same thing - any time a user is online, all of their friends just push the contents of their output queues to them. You'll get updates that are effectively just as rapid as facebook. For those freaks with 5000+ friends, that may be a scalability problem, at least for a smartphone. But for the average person with ~200 friends we aren't talking a terribly high load.

Re:Freemium at its best

[__aaeihw9960]

This is what happens when the focus is no longer fiscal responsibility but on profit in the short-term for shareholders -- err -- share-sellers.

People don't want to play the long game, and businesses can no longer play that game if they want to stay above water. SO, we have repeat of repeat of boom and bust, bubble and recession. In my (short) lifetime, I've seen: Something in Asia that was weird, South America, South Africa, Technology (hardware/software - 1st go-round), mortgages/lending, and now, folks, we've got the newest immediate cash-cow - Technology (Internet stuff and INFORMATION).

It will be interesting to see who gets it in the ass when this one pops, and how many people lose their jobs this time. I don't know about you folks, but my area is still reeling pretty hard from the mortgage crap that went down a while ago. I don't particularly care to see very few people make billions while the welders, cooks, teachers and janitors in my section of the US are off-work due to cuts.

Re:Freemium at its best

[daktari]

a mechanism that people can reasonably expect should work on the largest social networking provider in existence at the moment.

You are not Facebook's customer, you are Facebook's product. Facebook will care for their product (=you) only just enough to prevent you from leaving.

Facebook is more a "giant private data collection vortex" than a "social networking provider". It monetises your data and gives you enough "tools" to voluntary share as much personal stuff as they can get away with, leaving you with the illusion that you've gained the upper hand in this exchange.

Re:Freemium at its best

[jaymemaurice]

I might be a row in facebooks database, but I'm sure I'm also a few tables.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

http://socialfixer.com/ will fix that.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

so that's why FB is so lame? Everyone is out working another job just to keep FB going? Ha!
You'd think if Zucherberg cared so much for his 900 million, he'd make sure to have people in the office helping them.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

what's geocities?

Re:Freemium at its best

[moozey]

Why this comment was deemed "Flamebait" is beyond me. It was a legitimate question!

If this is surprising....

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a bridge to sell you!

captcha: income

Re:If this is surprising....

[WrongSizeGlass]

I have a bridge to sell you!

captcha: income

Until you are able to sell your bridge, I can sell you premium advertisers who will be willing to place ads on your bridge.

For the share holders

[Dyinobal]

I expect this is more than anything for the share holders/soon to be share holders. They have to actually you know generate revenue and continue to find new ways to generating it etc. It will only get worse from here, I promise you. Facebook might not of once been a soulless corporation but it is now.

Re:For the share holders

[Anonymous Coward]

I think of publicly traded companies in the same way as you and agree that most likely Facebook will become worse to use while doing everything it can to suck money out of its users, but it should be pointed out that Zuckerberg has always been an asshole who held his own users in contempt. In this particular case, 'soulless' may not be much of a step down.

Re:For the share holders

[Trepidity]

Facebook might not of once been a soulless corporation but it is now.

It's scary to think that one day people might look on the past years of Facebook as the good days of Facebook, when they really cared about their users and weren't just about extracting revenue from them...

Re:For the share holders

[__aaltlg1547]

There was a time when they were more focused on building their user base than (immediate) profits. They knew the network would only gain financial value when it had enough users to monetize, which it now does.

Re:For the share holders

[EdIII]

So... in other words... they prepared the pasture... lured in the sheeples... and now it is time for the harvest?

Re:For the share holders

[TaoPhoenix]

That sounds about right.

I can't wait for the next evolution to get past the current cultural deadlock that has Facebook as King.

Re:For the share holders

[AliasMarlowe]

So... in other words... they prepared the abbatoir... lured in the sheeples... and now it is time for the slaughter?

FTFY

Re:For the share holders

[sociocapitalist]

Do you know any corporations that aren't soulless?

Re:For the share holders

[AioKits]

So... in other words... they prepared the pasture... lured in the sheeples... and now it is time for the harvest?

Mwahahahaha... Hahahahahahahaa.. HAHAHAHAHAHAH!

*cough* I mean, whatever do you mean?

mwaha....

Who is stalking me?

[bartoku]

I bet people would pay $10/day for that feature.
Who searched for me, who viewed my profile, what part of my profile did they view?
To bad we are locked in to a proprietary social network that hides such information from the user...

Yes that would arguably kill the social networking site since people would be to paranoid to stalk...oh wait no it would not.

Re:Who is stalking me?

[ThePeices]

"I bet people would pay $10/day for that feature."

I bet people would. Problem is, once all six of them start paying, thats the end of the revenue stream.

Re:Who is stalking me?

[bartoku]

Facebook has over 800 million users, and your friends and stalkers would not know who has paid their $10 that day so why would the revenue stream stop unless they had no stalkers?

Re:Who is stalking me?

[veganboyjosh]

And when that happens, the new "Pay $5/day to see who's stalking YOU!" feature becomes available.

Re:Who is stalking me?

[wmac1]

We have a social network website with about 2 million members and this exact feature (who visited my profile, and hidden visits) bring in 5% of the whole revenues.

35% comes from advertisement, 5% from other membership fees (enable other features), and remaining from commission of selling products and services on the website.

The website is ranked 600-700 on alexa and we have 2 other websites with the same size.

Re:Who is stalking me?

[WrongSizeGlass]

Facebook has over 800 million users, and your friends and stalkers would not know who has paid their $10 that day so why would the revenue stream stop unless they had no stalkers?

Until Facebook starts selling "who's been watching you stalk them?" information of $10 a day. The best position for an arms dealer is squarely between both sides of a conflict.

Facebook should pay popular users.

[elucido]

The best thing Facebook can do is begin paying people to post relevant news articles and popular stories on Facebook.
They could make the money to pay them from ads, and most people get their news from Facebook.

We should be paid to use Facebook.

Re:Facebook should pay popular users.

[bartoku]

I like this idea!

Users who generate a lot of page views are rewarded.

This encourages users to create more and hopefully "better" (in terms of interest to their audience) posts.

In turn this draws more page views and makes Facebook more money.

Actually if Facebook was wise they would simply give you a private ranking on your post, how many views a picture or wall post garnered to encourage you to do more.

Facebook users love collecting things: friends, likes, Farmville items...give them another virtual currency: views!

Re:Facebook should pay popular users.

[Nemyst]

Alternatively, it'd cause more Click-the-cow-type games to crop up, because stupid sells.

Sad but true.

Re:Facebook should pay popular users.

[I_am_Jack]

Social Astroturfing! What a concept.

Re:Facebook should pay popular users.

[sco08y]

I'm a news junkie, and I often listen to C-SPAN radio. Some shows have callers, most of whom are awful. "And next is Bob on the Independents line. Hi Bob, you're on. Uh, hi, am I on? Yes, Bob, you're on with us. Uh, hi, so, uh, thanks for, uh, having me on, I really like C-SPAN, uh, thanks for your service Congressman, and, uh, I'm calling to ask about..." by which point I'm already yelling in my car, "just ask your fucking question!" There are rewarding exceptions, but the norm is outspoken incoherence.

The best thing Facebook can do is begin paying people to post relevant news articles and popular stories on Facebook.

No, really, it's not. Just like the callers, my friends and family on Facebook are fine folks who rarely have any insight into politics.

I'm on Facebook not to see amateur op-eds, but because I want to know what's going on in their lives, what they're actually doing, and so forth. Maybe a monetary incentive could help, but I suspect I'd wind up blocking people who were too spammy.

Re:Facebook should pay popular users.

[Anonymous Coward]

lowest common denominator for the win! hooray for pop culture and fads!!!
don't forget to use grade ten english.

Re:Facebook should pay popular users.

[HyperQuantum]

Users who generate a lot of page views are rewarded. This encourages users to create more and hopefully "better" (in terms of interest to their audience) posts.

No. It will encourage users to post more popular content.

And popular != better

Re:Facebook should pay popular users.

[sociocapitalist]

Sounds like a business model that might support an open source social networking model.

Re:Facebook should pay popular users.

[History's Coming To]

That's like saying people should be paid by the government for filling in their tax returns. The "users" aren't Facebook's customers, the advertisers are. The entire point is targetted advertising, the more information people post the more the adverts can be targetted and the more advertisers will pay. Facebook is an advertising platform, nothing more, the "social" aspect is just the hook to get the eyeballs to connect to the adverts.

Re:Facebook should pay popular users.

[elucido]

I'm a news junkie, and I often listen to C-SPAN radio. Some shows have callers, most of whom are awful. "And next is Bob on the Independents line. Hi Bob, you're on. Uh, hi, am I on? Yes, Bob, you're on with us. Uh, hi, so, uh, thanks for, uh, having me on, I really like C-SPAN, uh, thanks for your service Congressman, and, uh, I'm calling to ask about..." by which point I'm already yelling in my car, "just ask your fucking question!" There are rewarding exceptions, but the norm is outspoken incoherence.

The best thing Facebook can do is begin paying people to post relevant news articles and popular stories on Facebook.

No, really, it's not. Just like the callers, my friends and family on Facebook are fine folks who rarely have any insight into politics.

I'm on Facebook not to see amateur op-eds, but because I want to know what's going on in their lives, what they're actually doing, and so forth. Maybe a monetary incentive could help, but I suspect I'd wind up blocking people who were too spammy.

My friends on Facebook are college educated and highly intelligent. I don't know who you have on your Facebook but we aren't all alike.

Re:Facebook should pay popular users.

[elucido]

That's like saying people should be paid by the government for filling in their tax returns. The "users" aren't Facebook's customers, the advertisers are. The entire point is targetted advertising, the more information people post the more the adverts can be targetted and the more advertisers will pay. Facebook is an advertising platform, nothing more, the "social" aspect is just the hook to get the eyeballs to connect to the adverts.

Facebook isn't a tax it's a community. We should be able to make money from our content.

Re:Facebook should pay popular users.

[History's Coming To]

Facebook isn't a community, it's an advert serving system. You could quite legitimately say "Facebook users are a community", but Facebook itself is simply a system for delivering adverts to eyeballs. As for "your" content, as soon as you post it you grant Facebook non-exclusive rights to use it in any way they see fit. I suppose you could try invoicing them...

Re:Facebook should pay popular users.

[sco08y]

I'm a news junkie, and I often listen to C-SPAN radio. Some shows have callers, most of whom are awful. "And next is Bob on the Independents line. Hi Bob, you're on. Uh, hi, am I on? Yes, Bob, you're on with us. Uh, hi, so, uh, thanks for, uh, having me on, I really like C-SPAN, uh, thanks for your service Congressman, and, uh, I'm calling to ask about..." by which point I'm already yelling in my car, "just ask your fucking question!" There are rewarding exceptions, but the norm is outspoken incoherence.

The best thing Facebook can do is begin paying people to post relevant news articles and popular stories on Facebook.

No, really, it's not. Just like the callers, my friends and family on Facebook are fine folks who rarely have any insight into politics.

I'm on Facebook not to see amateur op-eds, but because I want to know what's going on in their lives, what they're actually doing, and so forth. Maybe a monetary incentive could help, but I suspect I'd wind up blocking people who were too spammy.

My friends on Facebook are college educated and highly intelligent. I don't know who you have on your Facebook but we aren't all alike.

If you weren't so snide, I wouldn't point out that you need to work on your reading comprehension: I never even remotely suggested that everyone on Facebook is the same. I can also see you don't grok statistics, or you would have caught the allusions in the analogy I presented.

But now that you mention it, most of my friends on Facebook are Army buddies, so yes, I probably have more high school educated people on Facebook than you do. I also have more combat veterans, more actual leaders, people that I had the honor of serving with, so I've got the better bargain, by far.

And I've never seen any evidence that education makes much difference in terms of grasping politics; educated people just grab talking points instead of making stuff up whole cloth, and they present equally superficial arguments with a more academic tone. They also tend to be bigger assholes because they're more intent on proving how clever they are.

Re:Facebook should pay popular users.

[elucido]

Facebook isn't a community, it's an advert serving system. You could quite legitimately say "Facebook users are a community", but Facebook itself is simply a system for delivering adverts to eyeballs. As for "your" content, as soon as you post it you grant Facebook non-exclusive rights to use it in any way they see fit. I suppose you could try invoicing them...

Without the people Facebook is nothing.

Your amazin Facebook post is lost in the noise...

[bartoku]

One can understand Facebook's problem. Too many people use it. Too many posts are being created. Too many people miss most of what's there. Yes, it's just like Twitter.

If Facebook's layout did not stink this would not be an issue.
If it looked like Google Reader with my hundreds of friends on the left with a little number of how many items I have not viewed that are new, it would be easy to keep up with everything.

Instead I get this seemingly random arrangement of things on the main page and it takes me two clicks to even bring up a complete friend list which is arranged in no useful order.

I cannot wait for the day when we look back on Facebook like we did on proprietary email protocols and instant messaging protocols and have a beautiful selection of clients.
I am still looking forward to the day when all those services are easily host on servers that are not harvesting the average user's data...

Reminds me of eBay....

[HockeyPuck]

eBay makes money in the form of micro amounts.

In your item to be sold...

Want a larger title?
Multiple colors
Pictures
highlighted in the listing...

All of these cost a few cents extra to get more "eyeballs" to see your listing and then eventually to click on it and hopefully to buy the item(s) you're selling.

Always wondered why I couldn't format my FB posts with bold/italics or justifications (left/right/center). Now, I can see them saying, "You want bold... that will be $.05."

Of course it would be really slick to have a setting similar to what email clients have which is to display all email messages, regardless of formatting as "plain text". Thereby getting rid of all the formatting people have paid for and display it in plain text (like it is now).

Re:Reminds me of eBay....

[LordLucless]

Of course it would be really slick to have a setting similar to what email clients have which is to display all email messages, regardless of formatting as "plain text". Thereby getting rid of all the formatting people have paid for and display it in plain text (like it is now)

GreaseMonkey.

Publicity Whoremongering

[Clogoddess]

Please dear moderators of The Flow -- CAN WE CUT THE FACEBOOK PUBLICITY STORIES please please please. -clogoddess

Re:Publicity Whoremongering

[z0idberg]

Sure.

That will be $1.80 (NZ).

Bitcoins not accepted.

Re:Publicity Whoremongering

[Opportunist]

Dude, read the comments... I'm not so sure whether those stories are pushed by the people who like or by the people who hate FB...

Re:Hew!

[ThePeices]

MyCleanPC is a scam. Please dont feed the trolls.

Why not flirt with Digg's corporate suicide model?

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I could imagine giving Facebook users the ability to earn money too. Allow them to advertise for corporate sponsors.

Then they can use that money to get new features like freemium games do like League of Legends?

Ok I kid I kid, but here is a real idea I wish someone would go with:

Advertisement revenue sharing. Make a game or gameshow where everyone can compete.
Then when you play ads get shown. At the end of the month, some of the advertisement revenue is kept for the company, but a % of it goes back to the players who did well that month or game.

I was thinking you they could run a weekly "You Don't Know Jack" tournament over the Internet. The winner gets real money based off the ads sold. If you were creative enough, you could make a ton of game shows and and make a game show network on the Internet. Television broadcast game shows only let a limited number of players play at once, with the Internet, you have a whole new spectrum of people to go with.

Re:Freemium Frendium

[Anonymous Coward]

> because your friends asked facebook to stop showing them. Then > when you noticed ... they were like, "I don't know, why didn't see it? > Oh man, facebook is so weird. Hiding stuff for _NO REASON_ !!! " This is the damn plain truth. You can unsubscribe someone; they keep seeing you, and have no fugging idea they're unliked. Frendium.

Forever alone

[zill]

I was hoping for a paid feature where Facebook doubles your number of friends.

Then I realized that 0 x 2 = 0.

Re:Forever alone

[darkfeline]

Doesn't Facebook automatically friend you with that what's-his-face guy who founded the darn thing (you can tell I don't really give much of a damn about Facebook)? Of course, the first thing I did with unfriend him...

Re:Forever alone

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.facebook.com/myspacetom

No, but now you can!

Re:Forever alone

[pjtp]

Firstly, thank you for your query regarding our new Facebook services.

For only an extra few dollars a week, you can increase the size of your friend list!

Our friend-bots act just like the real thing! Check out this special pricing!

$1 Bob - Basic model, posts occasional but doesn't chat or play games
$2 Frank - Posts regularly will play games but isn't available for chat
$5 Jane - Posts constantly, plays games and is available for chat
$50 Tina - The deluxe model! Complete with hot profile picture, private album, regular posts to your wall and is even available for chat (additional costs apply)

Re:Forever alone

[Opportunist]

I'm pretty sure you won't have to pay for that feature. It's paid for by the people who want to be on everyone's friend list automatically.

And at no additional cost, your new friends will also tell you about all the great features of products they recently bought.

And here you thought that pay-for model would suck...

SEC

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't feel like a quiet period.

Re:SEC

[Anonymous Coward]

Or a S-1 disclosed revenue source.

Re:"You're doing it wrong"

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about *posts*, however I do know that Facebook does not always show your *likes* to friends. I'm not talking about likes of someone's status where it'd be understandable if your friend couldn't see it because he's not a friend of the friend whose status you liked. I'm talking about your likes of pages or comments on pages or links, where ALL of your friends should be able to see those likes. How do I know that not all of my likes are seen by my friends? Because I created a second facebook account (that I friended) just for the purpose of getting to see EXACTLY what activity of mine my friends see.

I would pay to opt out of being a product

[cowtamer]

I seriously pay to have true privacy controls, where I could opt out of having my data / posts sold to whomever paid for it, or let me see who's been bidding (and let me choose who gets it).

I'd also pay to get access to all the data they have on me (what I have deleted, who's viewed my page, etc). This, of course, would not be good for their business model.

But they would probably take my money and sell my data anyway :)

Re:I would pay to opt out of being a product

[Dishevel]

I have that.
Got it a year and a half ago.
I quit Facebook.
I felt better for a while. Then I noticed that all that changed was that I spent even more time on /.

Re:I would pay to opt out of being a product

[cowtamer]

It's very trendy to hate Facebook, and be proud of not having a profile. But for some of us (especially those of us who have non-techie friends spread across the world), it provides real value.

It lets you:
    1) Find people (and be found by people) that you want to get back in contact with
    2) Hold asynchronous, casual conversations with friends, and friends of friends. I don't know an existing solution which allows the same thing as smoothly.

I am disturbed it has replaced texting and e-mail for most people, and I have friends for whom it is the most reliable contact info (i.e., they don't necessarily pay attention to their e-mail). I would love there to be a real open-source solution which allowed different clients, like e-mail and Usenet News used to be. I don't think this will happen anytime soon...

Re:I would pay to opt out of being a product

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm so trendy i hated facebook before all of you. When it was called geocities.
Damm kids. Get off my lawn.

Re:I would pay to opt out of being a product

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very trendy to hate Facebook, and be proud of not having a profile.

People are proud of addictions they have overcome; especially when they realise in retrospect that said addiction did more harm than good.

Re:I would pay to opt out of being a product

[sociocapitalist]

I'd rather see an open source facebook killer project that provides these features for free.

Re:I would pay to opt out of being a product

[Dishevel]

Does the fact that it has become trendy to leave Facebook somehow make people smarter for staying with such a horrible social network?
I do not understand your point other than to defend your staying there.
More power to all those who "Need" Facebook.
Anyone who can not be bothered to check their e-mail but responds quickly to Facebook posts are not people I end up doing much associating with.
Seriously. That is the excuse you have. I need to stay in contact with people who religiously follow Facebook but do not respond to their e-mails?
Look. If you enjoy Facebook and are fully aware of all the shit they do and find yourself to be semi cool with it. Fine.
Don't come at me with excuses like that though.
And if you really do have friends that won't respond to your e-mails and do with Facebook....
Well. When I got rid of Facebook, anyone whom I was acquainted with I lost touch with.
Do not miss any of them.

Re:I would pay to opt out of being a product

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very trendy to dismiss opinions you don't agree with as "trendy"...

Re:I would pay to opt out of being a product

[Pi Is A Rational]

Replacing text and e-mail disturbs me as well. It's also the only factor that stops me from deleting my facebook. My friends now are simply too lazy to even respond to the email chimes they get on their smartphones these days unless it's from facebook to see if they have an update!

I would be happy to pay

[mrstrano]

One/two dollar(s) per month to have a Facebook NOT sell my personal information. That would be much more than what Facebook is making per user at the moment (3.7B$ in revenue with ~800 million users in 2011). However, this feature would implicitly acknowledge to the public that they are selling your information. This is something that everybody sort of knows, but perhaps they don't want to make it clear.

Hold on a second.

[csumpi]

I thought the whole point of this experiment was for facebook to *make* money, not to lose money. Or were you just joking?

Sorting

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want to throw this out there because I f*@$ing hate the way that Facebook defaults to "Top Stories" instead of "Most Recent" and while that wouldn't be too terrible, it fucking resets itself back to "Top Stories" on all my devices whenever the F*@# it wants.

Relationship-status change perks

[Anonymous Coward]

The only perk I'd be interested in is if they made it so that if you changed your relationship status on FB, it automatically gets updated in real-life too.

cant believe this

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook, & twitter are being used as a surveillance,
of course people are aware of this, and don't care.

you can find out plenty about someone from the internet,
too many people are using the internet to become second life celebrities ( 300 photos, 1200 friends, etc )

the internet has always proved to be good, and evil

Haven't used Facebook for 12 weeks.

[Maxo-Texas]

a) lacked the time for it
b) the constant privacy violations and promises to 'never do it again'
c) several news reports on the very real risks to current and future employment of facebook posts.
d) at the time, nothing like google circles so I couldn't keep the different parts of my life really separate. Also see b) - similar violations of cross friend discussion privacy in the past. I'm sorry- I just don't want to share every aspect of my beliefs with everyone.
e) They are thinking of charging us? WE ARE THE PRODUCT. Without US, they are NOTHING.
f) It was just taking too much time to keep up with "friends" that I really barely knew. I've started living life for real in the time that's been freed up. Seriously- it was something like 1.5 hours a day to keep up with facebook. I use that time to play board games in person, go on dates, take classes, walk, ride a bicycle, exercise.

I'm back to email, text messages, and personal phone calls. I've made new friends in real life who i see in person and do real activities with.

Facebook is a virtual experience lacking in reality.

Final reason I stopped hanging out in facebook... They wanted my personal mobile phone number to play the games. I hear since then, I could now play the games without facebook. Oh yea.. and CONSTANT spam to join "games" and events in "games" which I didn't give a darn about.

Profits in narcissism

[Lordfly]

This is brilliant; allow people to preen over themselves by getting them to pay a fiver to let "more" people see their posts.

It's like printing money.

I doubt it will affect regular users of facebook much; I assume the kinds of people that would pay money to let their posts be seen more would be blocked already from most people's feeds....

Re:Profits in narcissism

[knorthern knight]

> I doubt it will affect regular users of facebook much; I assume the kinds of people that would
> pay money to let their posts be seen more would be blocked already from most people's feeds....

But blocking of premium users would only be allowed if *YOU* paid a premium. Sorta like arms manufacturers selling weapons to both sides of a war. Cynical? Moi?

Re:Profits in narcissism

[Opportunist]

Firefox plugin to the rescue in 3, 2, 1...

You can NOT dictate what my browser displays. Never.

Determined to repeat MySpace's mistakes

[hessian]

FacePlant seems determined to repeat the mistakes of MySpace.

Once you get all those people on the site, you just must turn them into cash cows, instead of taking a decent payout in advertising. The MBAs just insist.

The result is that soon interacting with the site becomes a pain in the neck and the smart people leave. They are replaced by many, many more people, but we all know that the number of warm bodies is only part of the story.

When you lose those top echelon users, your site starts to become a virtual tenement. Soon it's a kicking around ground for the lost, like MySpace, Digg, and other dot-com burnouts.

Good thinking, FacePlant.

Re:Determined to repeat MySpace's mistakes

[Opportunist]

From the view of the MBAs that's a smart move. Rip off the users, rake in the money, dump the husk, move on to the next.

Locusts at work.

Re:Determined to repeat MySpace's mistakes

[Cro Magnon]

Not that smart long-term. You can get fatter eating goose eggs for a year than you can eating the whole goose for a few days.

Re:Determined to repeat MySpace's mistakes

[marcosdumay]

The problem is that Facebook is worth $30e9. For that kind of investiment, one'd expect some huge revenue streams, that just selling publicity slots won't create. Or, in other words, the problem is that some people has put (and will soon put) too much money into Facebook, expecting it to be something completely different from what it is. They'll have a nasty surprize, of course, as one can't stay deluded in a finantial market for long.

Interesting that it looks like this problem is inherent of social networks. There are always several of them out there, competing for users. Normaly the one with the biggest budget wins, but that budget comes from investiment... So, Facebook probably won't be the last iteration.

Re:Determined to repeat MySpace's mistakes

[Opportunist]

Not as long as there are always other geese you can slaughter. That's the problem here why this strategy works. They eat this goose today, and another goose next week. In other words, you get even fatter if you don't eat goose eggs for a year, but instead eat goose after goose.

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

N+1 suckers born every day.... No nothing missing from my thought

sage and report

[Anonymous Coward]

You see the flag there on the lower right of the message?

Click it.

"spam"

Bam, done.

Re:Your amazin Facebook post is lost in the noise.

[spacenet]

So the same day then.

Re:Hew!

[Lord_of_the_nerf]

Well, they're a third party that takes private information with your unwitting consent.

So really, if they just let you post pictures of your cat and passive-aggressive pleas for attention, it would be worth $95 billion.

This explains the nerfed news feed

[Culture20]

Remember when the FB news feed used to list everyone's statuses? Then you had to explicitly tell it to show everything, and now even that option doesn't exist; you have to deal with whatever random crap shows up, missing important statuses. All the data's still there, but they needed an environment where there would be an artificial scarcity of statuses to make promoting one's own status on others' news feeds valuable enough to make people want to pay for it (although only the most narcissistic would want to).

Begining

[Smiddi]

This looks like the begining of the end for Facebook. Companies that pay for their posts will get the most user reach. Hmmm, sounds like a business model for making money, not social interaction? I closed my account recently due to getting the same old crap posted from the same old people (the ones I interacted with on FB - not the ones I actually care about reading, because I dont interact with them in FB land; I usually only interact with them in real life). After this change is implimented I can see may more following.

Pay to talk to your friends?

[pfarber]

Only in America are you narcissistic enough to think that what you have to say is SO important its work PAYING to put it in front of your 'friends'.

 

Re:Pay to talk to your friends?

[Chrisq]

Only in America are you narcissistic enough to think that what you have to say is SO important its work PAYING to put it in front of your 'friends'.

Not only in America. If your friends are politicians you can expect to do this anywhere

Andy Warhol

[Anonymous Coward]

What Andy Warhol said about the people of the future (that's us) being famouse for fifteen wasn't so much prescient as perceptive. He was was simply restating the observation that everybody present or future wants to be famous (even if you're an "Anonymous" hacker).

So how's this any different from politicians or recording artists paying to be heard? Some people become famous by accident or hard work. Some have to pay to become famous.

Re:Andy Warhol

[Opportunist]

Personally, I don't understand that wish. Rich, I can see. Famous, I cannot. I'd prefer to be rich and unknown.

Re:Your amazin Facebook post is lost in the noise.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it looked like Google Reader with my hundreds of friends on the left with a little number of how many items I have not viewed that are new, it would be easy to keep up with everything./p>

Seriously good idea right there, that's what we should have upon "subscribing" to friends posts..

May it die in flames

[Grayhand]

I hated high school. Facebook is high school 2.0. Why wouldn't I want it to die a horrible death? Social networking is for people that lack actual lives. I guess based on their numbers there's nearly a billion of them. Somehow I get through my day without logging onto Facebook and I somehow have survived by not posting on the site. Does this make me "uncool"? God I hope to hell it does if posting makes you cool. I thought being cool was NOT doing what the sheep do?

Re:May it die in flames

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought being cool was NOT doing what the sheep do?

Just remember, that you're unique; just like everybody else.

Re:May it die in flames

[Opportunist]

Cool is what the cool kids do. As it has been, is, and always will be. If they smoke, smoking is cool. If they protest for the rain forest, that's cool too.

Not doing something different is cool, doing something new is. Identifying a trend and following it as the first person is cool. It would be even cooler to form a trend, but few people have that kind of spunk. Ok, let's do the "teenage guide to coolness".

First, attitude.

Act as if you would never follow some kind of trend like all the sheeple. Then find out where the trend is heading and act like you invented it. Make sure that it's not just some sub-culture fad that only a handful of weirdos follow, you do not want to be one of them. It has to be something that everyone can do and would do. And it must not be something that has been a trend before, unless you can "retro" it. Be wary of that one, though, that can backfire easily. Your best bet is to look to other countries. Japan worked like a charm for a while, Russia would be better today. Oh, and forget everything you've seen on TV. Once a TV networks picks it up, it WAS cool.

Second, followership.

Develop a cult followership. That's hard, I know. What you first and foremost need is to be the ring leader of your group of friends. If you can't accomplish that, forget trying to vie people who are not your friends. Work on that first. Then, introduce the trend you picked up to test the waters. Don't push it on them, it smacks of effort and nobody likes that. Just do it and wait for them to judge. If they sneer, drop it. Now. And act as if it was just some kind of joke. If they pick it up, push it. Make sure they spread the word. And finally, most important,

third, make sure everyone knows you did it first

This is crucial. The whole ordeal is moot if nobody knows that you were the cool guy that brought them this piece of teenage heaven. If you ever notice one of your friends trying to take credit for your discovery, instantly butt in and tell them off, but make certain you do so while having someone to backup your claim to fame. The more people seeing you do this the better, because the schoolyard gossip thrives on stories like who found what trend, especially if there's some challenge and you have "proof" that you're the trendsetter.

Do it a few times and you'll be the top cool guy.

And if that doesn't work, hey, what do I know, I never was cool! :)

Re:May it die in flames

[Anonymous Coward]

Social networking is for people that lack actual lives.

Just the opposite, I'm afraid. If you had no actual life, what point would there be in keeping in communication with old friends (since you don't have old friends since you don't have a life)? Your disdain for social interaction via common media shows that you don't have enough of a life. Get out there and live a little and you'll be surprised how much you want to communicate with others as a result.

Re:May it die in flames

[HapSlappy_2222]

This is also the Hipster's Guide to Hipstering. Which, I guess, is "cool" now. Fuck em all. What's "cool" is being able to afford food, rent, and vacations. The "cool" kids can enjoy the fact that the rest of us giggle about em from Cabo.

Re:May it die in flames

[Pi Is A Rational]

One of the reasons that got me logging in less to facebook was that co-workers and other people I barely communicated with started adding me and I'd sift through their wall posts and it's usually talking to themselves posting youtube videos of their favourite songs with no comments or talking about ex boyfriend breakups publicly to get some kind of support that doesn't come.

Re:Hew!

[Anonymous Coward]

This post started with such high potential. I was gleefully anticipating the kind of depraved writing that makes reading slashdot at -1 a must for me over the past years.

Then it just turns out to be spam.

I, sir, am extremely disappointed.

Replace Facebook? No, replace everything.

[VortexCortex]

I expect to see facebook left in the dustbin of internet history by software that runs mostly on our phones.

I agree with you except this part. It will take a while to get it to you, but it will not just involve phones (which can 'die', or get lost far too easily). The software will run mostly on your home PC -- All the hard stuff anyway, like data synchronisation and storage. Phones will get more powerful, but so will PCs. The notion of a "client" and "server" are irrelevant -- That's much higher level distinction than needed, but if I must apply these horrible terms which are used to limit your use of technology, then I will...

Your PC would run server software that handles the majority of synchronisation and data storage and notification between other always on boxes. Then your data can actually be marked private, and kept private, or actually only shared with select people (not a 3rd party), or made public for all to see. Security will be of utmost importance, so I doubt this will be a MS OS, maybe not even GNU/Linux or Apple... I've been working on such an animal for about two decades (security conscious from machine code, to programming language, all the way to the script terminal & GUIs -- Applications that run in their own separate OS instance granted only the features they need, for actual sandboxing and app-level snapshots), but I digress. The mobile devices will talk with your home server(s) and receive notifications and data -- Not just social data, but email, documents, photos, videos, etc. An identity network will also be needed -- However, it will be as simple to add trusted contacts as it is to share phone #'s via calling someone so they have your number in their call history.

Fortunately there are several existing solutions one could "glue" together to create such a system. Unfortunately, I can remotely compromise nearly every one of them -- if I can do it, there are many other exploits others will find. ::Sigh:: The cost in time and attention to detail required to write ACTUALLY secure code are very high, but it is completely possible to create systems that are immune to remote threats. Humans are fallible, but I test my creations very rigorously to ensure they are completely correct and do only what they should before I ever use them, and continually re-test EVERYTHING each addition to ensure integrity.

"Diaspora", you say? You access that with a web browser that compiles arbitrary data to machine code, then flags it as executable and runs it...on an OS that allows a compromise in one application to affect others; The "server" is written in Ruby on Rails -- Such a system is Swiss cheese in terms of security. Most current software that "powers" the web practically exploits itself under the slightest pressure.

I reiterate: It is NOT impossible to create secure technology that is focused on end user freedom, privacy, and capabilities. It's just that no one wants to create it, (well, almost no one), because it's VERY hard work, and does NOT pay well in terms of reward or profit. In fact, I'm frequently criticised for wanting to fix everything... To such nay-sayers: My Mt. Everest looks different than yours, but they're both climbed for the same reasons. Myself or someone else will achieve this goal, or I'll happily die trying to complete it.

-------
Protip: Many consumer ISPs prohibit running "servers", so a distributed data & notification network becomes much more difficult to create, but it must happen, the Internet was thus designed. If we could decentralise and redistribute the data loads it would be cheaper for them to operate / less peering needed.

Re:Why not flirt with Digg's corporate suicide mod

[WrongSizeGlass]

I could imagine giving Facebook users the ability to earn money too. Allow them to advertise for corporate sponsors.

You mean like spammers? Astroturf'ers? Shills?

Re:Your amazin Facebook post is lost in the noise.

[AngryDeuce]

I think it's deliberate obfuscation, myself. If it's easy to get right at the information you're seeking, then you're not spending all your time on Facebook, and we can't fucking have that, can we?

I never understood how people can stand shit like that. I admit, maybe it's my own low-level OCD when it comes to organization (you should see my media folder on my computer...impeccably tagged and sorted) but I cannot fucking stand the clusterfuck of crap that is the average Facebook wall these days. I haven't logged in myself in literally years now, but I see family members surfing FB all the time and it's just such a cluttered-up mess of crap that I don't know how people use it without going crazy. Even back when I was using it in the late 00's, I needed to have programmer friends of mine write me greasemonkey scripts to get rid of all the shit all over the place. The signal-to-noise ratio was through the fucking roof then, and once they start letting people pay to get their shit moved to the top it's going to turn into even more of a spam-tastic piece of garbage then it is already.

Facebook is the new Myspace.

Asking for a feature

[Opportunist]

"Hide all comments (aka ads) from people who dumped money on FB"

Let's be blunt here, who do you think will pay for their service?

Re:Asking for a feature

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds good, let's make it a paid feature!

Motto

[roman_mir]

Well, unlike Google's slogan of 'no evil', FB has its own slogan:move fast and break stuff.

So they are just living up to their own expectations, they are setting the goal high and reaching it alright.

To think about it, the motto IS weird, wouldn't it make sense at least to add something to it, like this:

Move fast, break stuff, then fucking fix it before we fired you!?

Re:Slashdot tests waters by sucking Facebook's coc

[Magada]

He cashed out.

Close, but not quite

[Johann Lau]

Paying Facebook to show posts still doesn't mean *I* will read them; you'd have to pay me directly for that.

Is it really that

[__aaeihw9960]

hard to see the blatant step-forward for marketing here? Whereas Google does directed marketing quite well, facebook allows for 21st century billboards.

Sure, I can pay to have my super cute doggy picture noticed by everyone, and the more vapid consumers certainly will, but where is the real money in this scheme? Hey, remember all of those corporations' pages that you i-dots have friended or liked or whatever the F*ing term is? That crap can now get noticed by YOU AND EVERYONE YOU KNOW, MORE OFTEN!!! Hooray!!

I have an algorithm for sharing...

[Anonymous Coward]

I go out and do stuff with them. Or if they are geographically unavailable, I call them or send an email. Works great. Everyone gets the information I want them to have, nothing I don't want out is seen by anyone and I get to experience the real world. I also don't have to set filters to avoid hearing every update about whose pet threw up on a particular day or which pair of shoes someone was wearing when they went to a coffee shop...

Re:Your amazin Facebook post is lost in the noise.

[AntEater]

If it looked like Google Reader with my hundreds of friends on the left with a little number of how many items I have not viewed that are new, it would be easy to keep up with everything.

I would love to see that! That, and an open protocol that you could use with various clients would make it truely useful. Still, I'd probably be better off just cancelling my acocunt like I've been threatening to do for a long time.

Mountain Dew presents Lil Wayne

[gelfling]

Or some vodka company promoting Kardashian. Thank god for the internet.

HuffPo needs to let all of Facebook know that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Paid content comes to Facebook, and the Huffington Post would like everyone to know that it had a cheese sandwich for lunch and that is currently pooping. #TRENDINGPAIDCONTENTINANITY

Re:Your amazin Facebook post is lost in the noise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Did you even use Myspace? It was design anarchy. The unwashes masses were completely comfortable changing their profile's HTML, so they went crazy with colors, fonts, font sizes, multiple embedded flash videos and music that autoplayed, wallpaper-sized pictures and animated GIFs everywhere. It was literally painful to look at, and in a lot of cases legtimately unreadable. Facebook's layout is at least clean, consistent and linear. There's really no comparison. It may not be pretty, but it's a uniformly formatted list of text or thumbnails.

Jobs would love this behavior

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I checked there's no setting to default to "Most Recent", so I need to remember to manually change it every time I go to my feed page.

Facebook resets this setting whenever it's been "too long" since the last time you logged in from a particular device. If you make a few assumptions, Facebook was being very Apple-like when they introduced this behavior.

Assuming that most people only ever log in to Facebook from a single device (either their computer or their mobile phone) and assuming that most people who can manage to go 12-14 hours without compulsively checking their feed will not take the time to go back and view several screens-worth of feed data in order to review everything that has happened with their friends, then the most useful display will be a screen or two of highlights of what you missed seeing over the last day or so. This is very much the type of UI "optimization" that Jobs was always pushing for.

Personally it drives me bonkers because (1) I am willing to go a day or two without checking Facebook but I'm also willing to spend the time to page through all the posts my friends made during that time and (2) "Most Recent" has bugs such that you can look at time x and see posts 1, 2, 3 and look again at time x+1 and see only posts 1 & 3.

In a bit of deviousness, Facebook will make extra effort to show your friends posts in your feed if you give Facebook more demographic information by telling FB which of your friends are "Family", which are "Close Friends", etc.

Craigslist is cracking down on that

[Anonymous Coward]

The only perk I'd be interested in is if they made it so that if you changed your relationship status on FB, it automatically gets updated in real-life too.

Criagslist has promised the police that they are working harder to remove that capability...

Re:Hew!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a troll, it is spam.

But at least as spam it is entertaining in its absurbity. I mean, a professional computer repair person not only can't think of a way to fix an infected computer, they are also getting stressed about it and then they send it off to the "World's Greatest Minds"(TM) like the world's greatest minds would care about a poxy virus ridden computer. Although the one a day or so ago was even better where this spammer was posing as a regular customer and claimed the shop he took it into not only couldn't repair it, they were in tears when he picked it up and two of the techs committed suicide over it.

You'd have to be a complete moron to fall for this shit, and Slashdot must be the worst site to try this on

More?

[Anonymous Coward]

The company is piss-in-the-wind, yet still valued at or near $100B. They virtually print their own money, but that's just not enough. How many revenue streams do you need, Mr. Zuckerberg? This man tosses $1B around for kicks at his coffee table, but his company just needs more!

Sponsored Ads or Astroturfing?

[TheStonepedo]

Perhaps people on Facebook for profit should follow those game makers' examples and return to gamema^H^H^H^H^H^Hpaying to have their ads up top.

Yes! FB hides friends posts even for "Show all"

[robertinventor]

It's the edge rank, see here: http://edgerank.net/I create a special facebook I generally see just a few posts from some of my fb friends. My fix is to make special "Friends" groups of particular groups of people I want to follow, e.g. I have a special one for my relatives. Also if you want to see all the facebook posts from someone particular then you can go to their own page on facebook and read their wall.