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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

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.

[Nemyst]

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

Sad but true.

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...

Re:Hew!

[ThePeices]

MyCleanPC is a scam. Please dont feed the trolls.

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: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?

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.

sage and report

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Click it.

"spam"

Bam, done.