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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
Please dear moderators of The Flow -- CAN WE CUT THE FACEBOOK PUBLICITY STORIES please please please. -clogoddess
MyCleanPC is a scam. Please dont feed the trolls.
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.
God spoke to me
I was hoping for a paid feature where Facebook doubles your number of friends.
Then I realized that 0 x 2 = 0.
This doesn't feel like a quiet period.
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 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 :)
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.
I thought the whole point of this experiment was for facebook to *make* money, not to lose money. Or were you just joking?
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.
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.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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....
hookers and grits.
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.
Futurist Traditionalism
You see the flag there on the lower right of the message?
Click it.
"spam"
Bam, done.
So the same day then.
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.
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).
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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!?
You can't handle the truth.
Personally, I don't understand that wish. Rich, I can see. Famous, I cannot. I'd prefer to be rich and unknown.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
He cashed out.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Paying Facebook to show posts still doesn't mean *I* will read them; you'd have to pay me directly for that.
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!!
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.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
Or some vodka company promoting Kardashian. Thank god for the internet.
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.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
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.