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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).
MyCleanPC is a scam. Please dont feed the trolls.
I was hoping for a paid feature where Facebook doubles your number of friends.
Then I realized that 0 x 2 = 0.
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 :)
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.
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.
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).
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! :)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.