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

[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.

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.

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.