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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.
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...
MyCleanPC is a scam. Please dont feed the trolls.
Alternatively, it'd cause more Click-the-cow-type games to crop up, because stupid sells.
Sad but true.
So... in other words... they prepared the pasture... lured in the sheeples... and now it is time for the harvest?
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.
You could have sent an email to a bunch of people. I hear that works.
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....)
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.