Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Testing $100 Fee To Mail Mark Zuckerberg
iComp writes with a story about how it will cost you $100 to message Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook. "Got something you'd like to say to Mark Zuckerberg? The Facebook CEO still maintains a profile on the social networking site he founded, but beginning on Friday, sending him a personal message could cost you. Mashable was the first to notice that some users who weren't otherwise on the Behoodied One's Friends list were being asked to pony up before they could send a message to his Inbox, to the tune of $100 a pop. As El Reg reported in December, Facebook has been conducting a limited test of a feature that requires users to pay a fee to send messages to people with whom they have no direct connection. The idea is that the type of users who like to send spam, hate speech, and otherwise frivolous messages typically aren't willing to pay for the privilege. Impose a fee – however small – and they probably won't bother."
I'll pay $1000 to slap him silly.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I just shot a fart out of my very own fuckyhole, and no one else's. What say you?
It's his company, so any money made benefits him, but when they start selling access to other people without them making anything, it just doesn't work. Now, perhaps if they allowed people to sign up for this service, and do something like Apple where there's a 70/30 split, then maybe you have a recipe for success.
That's what I read, at first.
No, it doen't make sense. :)
Keep scrambling for revenue, failbook
$100 won't really stop people. I guess you could argue it would cut down on some, but people really do have disposable income to be able to power through it anyway.
I'll just use e-mail instead.
"It’s free and always will be."
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Next up: Want to say something against the current establishment in your daily status updates? Just pay $1.59* and exercise your right to free speech!
*A small fee to cover the overhead to Facebook, Inc. for licking your local congressman's ass to compensate for your brazen use of the First Amendment.
I predict that Slashdot groupthinkers will bash the idea of ever paying for Facebook messages as greedy, evil capitalism at its worst, etc., even though they overwhelmingly supported charging a fee to send emails to cut down on mass spam when that idea was being thrown around a few years back.
I assumed it was only polite to message someone who you like to add as friend, before or while you click 'friend'. ... I just know, they are not my friends ofc.
Now I assume I have just to click 'friend'. Albeit most of the people I know on FB
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
When you scramble to monetize your product by pimping off your CEO you know it's downhill from here on.
Next:
- for 5 euros they will attach the head of one of your friends on a porn star
- charge 1 cent every time you use your FB login with another site
- charge $5 to add 50 new friends for the socially inept or people you need to get that extra mile
- for $1,000 bump someone off FB with the same name and get exclusive rights for 12 months
- $5 for audio greetings, $10 for video
-$1 to send a text message
Wearing pants should always be optional.
100$ to send him mail? After all that 100$ dosent even garantie you reply from him...
If your fees are lower than the expected value, there is no incentive not to spam. I want the option to add an extra surcharge.
If he's guaranteed to read it, I'd pay to send "go fuck yourself".
I've already sent a message by not having an account.
I just read a relevant quote on this matter in the past few days, but I don't recall where. Let me try to paraphrase:
No one is so far beneath you that you cannot learn something from them, and no one is so far above you that you need permission to communicate with them.
Anyone know the source?
Let's raise $10k to get 100 people to send Zuckerberg GNAA spam.
No. If you were going to charge to Jail Mark Zuckerberg, you'd never want to set such a low price.
how much to have rick mercer dress him up like a girl
and put stephen harper image with his arm around him
I figure my scheme will lose $15.9 B a year, but I think people might go for it.
Their they're doing there hair.
I like the concept. Actually I think it is brilliant. There are gazillions of things that fight over our attention every day just as we open our eyes. We live in constant noise of commercials/e-mails/calls/banners/meeting-requests/u-name-it. And the most efficient way to reach a person is to be loud. And annoying. And it costs virtually nothing. And intermediaries - ad agencies etc. are those who take the most advantage and profit from this mess. But with this concept - everybody can charge for for their attention Directly . Maybe mr. everybodys attention starts to be Valued . IIn that case it would be like giving the power back to the people!
It's a better business plan than some dot-coms. At least you have some sort of revenue model.
Certified mail is a lot cheaper and will get his attention faster than someone paying $100 so his personal assistant will see the message.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I wish I could do this with my e-mail. I think I would like to charge any unsolicited e-mail senders 100 bucks too.
Hahaha. Facebook really is desperate.
I'm pretty sure that if you had something really important (a major business deal for example), it will still reach the main man just fine using mark.zuckerberg@facebook.com .
If you charge me a fee to send a message, then guarantee me the person receiving it will see it.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
The real purpose of the $100 fee to Zuckerberg is only to draw free press to Facebook's paid spam service, where they'll allow companies to send you unsolicited emails that bypass spam filters in exchange for a fee. Without the fee Facebook says those messages go into the the "other" folder; with the fee the messages will go directly to the inbox. It's reprehensible, and Facebook has the nerve to claim the purpose of the fee is to reduce spam. The real purpose is to eliminate free spam.
but only if Zuckerberg would respond back.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
Since when is $100 a small fee?
I think it's to reduce the complaints for how crappy his service is.
It's $0.45. $0.46 come Jan 27.
paintball
If Facebook will split this fee with the recipients, check your apps. How many of them have requested (and been granted) permission to send messages on your behalf? Could those apps send messages to persons not on your friends list (say the author of the app) and automatically accept the charge? If they can't now, how long before someone unscrupulous hacks it so it is possible and packages that up into a Farmville clone?
Because sending email spam costs virtually nothing, I average about 1,000 email spams caught by my filters each day. (Most people don't know how many spams their provider filters out, so you may see 50 in your box, but 500 others were sent and rejected by the mail server.)
I get about 3 paper spam in the mailbox each day, because mail spam costs the sender several cents to send. Hmm, 1,000 versus 3. Seems like when the sender has to pay a few dimes each, that reduces spam by 99.97%.
I would be willing to pay $100 dollars for a permanent media blackout so I will never have to hear about Mark Zuckerberg ever again. The only thing I might miss is a future story where he gets convicted by the feds for insider trading and fraud. But this is America were corporations and CEOs are effectively exempt from all laws so such an event ever occurring is slim.
A new spam filter or rather a spam preventer !
Either way I like this. I wish Google would do this and fast !
I could get about $2000 per 24 hr loop ! Jeezus F**K'N Crybaby I could retire and move to the Bahamas and sip Margaritas all day and night long !
Yee Haa This Is For Me ! Sigh me up Hoodie !
XD
Because all you're gonna get are a bunch of people commenting about how smart they are because they dislike facebook. Like seriously people, you do realize you're just doing the thing that like middle school aged kids do when hate things that are popular to try to look cool? You're just dressing it up a lot more to look intellectual. There are perfectly valid reasons to not like facebook, I'm sure there are lots of people here who legitimately just don't like or don't use it--but I sincerely doubt they're the same people who comment on every single thing relating to facebook announcing to the world how cool/smart/intelligent/clever/hip they are for not liking it.
Back in the early 1980s when I was in college, bars started experimenting with coin operated breathalizer machines. We used them to compete to see who could get the highest blood alcohol number. I imagine that color coded glowing ice cubes would have the same effect.
Plus there is also the problem that by the time you hit red, you no longer remember why the hell your ice cube is glowing.
Doesn't he know you can configure the settings so that people who aren't on your friends list can't send you messages or post on your wall. Meanwhile, the US Post Office only charges 44 cents.
But for different reasons: The spammers will find ways to avoid being billed themselves - having a habit of abusing the resources of others, they already are in people's PCs with their botnets, for crying out loud...
He's probably not listening, but I'd be really very surprised if he actually reads his facebook page either. I'd guess he probably has some flunky do it. I might be willing to pay $100 for the video footage of his flunky conveying my message, but I doubt that's in the cards either. In any event, I can't think of anything that could interest me in creating a facebook account. Except maybe if I tell someone in the company to blow me and they took me up on it. Let's see if they're really willing to go that extra mile...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
i might gladly pay the 100 bucks if i got sworn assurance he would personally read it and not some community manager.
oh, and facebook should have paid the little $500 fee i just established for receiving emails from me, of course.
i certainly would. if i had something to say to this dipshit, that is.
fucking retarded shit, this facebook thing. can you really believe this?
If you want to get a message to Zukenberg, just buy facebook stock and get him your message through official bureaucratic channels. You're more likely to get a response that way. :-)
... though I doubt he'll pay attention: Deleting my Facebook account.
Ads on the right-hand side of the page aren't enough. They now feel a need to insert them into my news stream. (To be fair, the frequency of those has dropped off considerably. But if it starts up again, I'll probably be telling FB see ya.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
If you never give facebook your cell# or credit card#; its not a problem.
Charging just because someone isn't on the buddy list prevents people from asking, "Hey, are you so and so, from x university? Didn't we have y class together?" as much and to be quite frank, I would despise them for doing that.
No. But they throw in a free spell check.
I love it, go for it Zuck! This is clearly a preview of a roll-out to the general user base, where anyone, including advertisers, has to pay a user to send them messages (unless they're already accepted as a friend). This is great! Monetize advertisers (FB takes a transaction fee), and incentivise users to accept advertising an their own terms. I bet the next version of this will include topic and interest filters, so you can discount the fees on things you might actually like to hear about, and raise them on the noise. I'd only charge $0.50 to hear about a tech item, but $100 to hear about a Justin Beiber concert. Works for me, where do I sign up?
OKCupid already rolled this out a few months ago for all users. If a person's mailbox is full and someone tries to message them, they get a popup asking for a $1 "bribe" (their actual term) to have the message go the user anyway. Wouldn't be surprised if they also set up fake profiles of hot girls with "full" mailboxes. Easy money.
Hi, ;)
I just tried to message him and it got through... oups
your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. your idea will not work. here is why it won't work. (one or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) it is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) it will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) users of email will not put up with it
( ) microsoft will not put up with it
( ) the police will not put up with it
( ) requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) open relays in foreign countries
( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) asshats
( ) jurisdictional problems
(x) unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) huge existing software investment in smtp
(x) susceptibility of protocols other than smtp to attack
(x) willingness of users to install os patches received by email
( ) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes
( ) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) extreme profitability of spam
( ) joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) technically illiterate politicians
( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) blacklists suck
( ) whitelists suck
( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored
(x) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) sending email should be free
(x) why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) i don't want the government reading my email
(x) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
( ) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work.
( ) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
(x) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Given the hidden costs of having a Facebook account, I'd say anyone who has the ability to use this service has already paid enough for the privilege.
Imagine you get more mail a day than you can read. You got two choices: spend significant time filtering through or risk missing the signal for the noise.
Now imagine every message in your inbox cost someone $100. First, it would significantly cut down on the volume. Second, if you know that a stranger spent $100 to write to you, you can assume it's not completely trivial - someone must have thought that what they have to say is so valuable that you're going to care and respond that they staked money on it.
Frankly, $100 is cheap. Say I have a startup idea that I think facebook would jump all over but I have no-one in my network who can help me bring it to FB's attention. I would GLADLY pay $100 for access to Zuckerberg - if $100 is enough to bring his inbox to a reasonable size such that my genuinely good idea could get the attention it deserves, it's well worth it. Frankly I think $100 is too cheap for someone at as high a profile as Zuckerberg.
Many of us get LinkedIn email from recruiters that we generally proceed to ignore. Now let's say a recruiter had to pay $5 to email me (if they weren't in my network): it would both cut down the amount of noise, and make me likely to take the email more seriously: if the recruiter was willing to put up money to make me aware of his opportunity, maybe there's something there.
Similarly, imagine it cost $5 to send your resume to a company. It would immediately stop people submitting their resumes for every posting in the world. The company could rely on the fact that any application for any position is from someone who genuinely believes they are a match and perhaps do away with machine resume filters, if the volume was brought down enough. In other words: although it would seem "greedy" to charge people $5 to apply for your job, it would end up meaning that more of the better candidates made it further through the process.
In general, putting a $ figure on a communication significantly increases the signal to noise ratio. $100 for Zuckerberg's attention is fair. $5 for my attention on LinkedIn is probably fair too - especially if I could set my own price. If I don't get anyone contacting me, I drop the price. If I get too many bogus offers, I raise it.
http://ed.markovich.googlepages.com
Today, I announce that anyone who sends me unsolicited email will have to pay a $100 processing fee.
Now is there any government agency which can help me enforce this?
You're a jerk, Zuckerberg. A complete kneebiter.
-matt
A whole Chest of those 1 Trillion dollar coins they are going to start minting.
I signed into Facebook once, a long time ago to see what it was. Then I checked out why, Facebook out of hundreds of startups with similar ideas got picked, and they didn't for investment money.
Had nothing to do with Facebook being superior in any way, but, it was selected mainly on intelligence gathering grounds based on its end goals.
So if you use Facebook, your are like Mr. Zuckerberg has said, a Dumb F*uck.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
No one will read the emails. They are just saying it costs $100 to send them.
Those who invested in Facebook at the IPO have lost 17% of their money.
It seems to me that a lot of people don't realize that the financial system in the U.S. is so corrupt that individuals who would otherwise want to invest should not try to compete with those who have billions of dollars to support corruption and to take unfair advantage.
After he told everyone that email is dead, now he wants to levy a charge on every message, the (under-priced) $100 Zuckerberg stamp is just to test the market, I suggest we all send him one cash on delivery (COD). PS: MZ, sorry about the FB share price.
All those interested in telling Zuckerberg to go f*ck himself, please donate one penny toward the cost...
I will take the $100 quid and put into my retirement fund !! Money much better spent IMO
This is a ploy to get money
Leave it to a Jew to come up with a system that simultaneously both censors and lines their pockets with $$$.
Permission to send an email is meaningless if there is no indication he will read it. Presumably he has a small army of people handling corporate and personal communication. Let's look at the economics of his reading your special message:
If we assume he will be earning $1B this year (argue if you will, I don't care), and he works 200 days, that means he makes $5M/day or $625K/hour or around $10K/minute. He gets paid $50,000 to take a dump during working hours.
Now here's your $100 message. Does he really want to waste $20,000 worth of his time reading it?
...omphaloskepsis often...
Reminds me of a certain Chris Rock bit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZrFVtmRXrw
How about Facebook paying ME a $100 fee for every time I have to be exposed to some fucking nonsense app, add, or other bullshit I can't get away from. How about Facebook paying me for all my PAIN and SUFFERING for having to even KNOW that FACEBOOK exists in the world.
I would pay $100 bucks though to see Zuckerburg SHOVE the ENTIRE FACEBOOK up his ASS without lubricant.
If it looks like a fish ...
If it smells like a fish
If it tastes like a fish
aaaaaaa
But for different reasons: The spammers will find ways to avoid being billed themselves - having a habit of abusing the resources of others, they already are in people's PCs with their botnets, for crying out loud...
But then again, if the system detects spam coming from your e-mail address and sends you a warning that you should pay up to allow the message to go out, then voilá! Free botnet warning! You end up actually getting a fringe benefit from this message fee.
Yeah that is about the going rate.
A strange bot-herder it would be not to teach his one-click ponies how to hit "Oh, yes, PLEASE pester all my friends!" a millisecond after it pops up...
On someone else's machine, at the drone's users' expense.
If you never give facebook your cell# or credit card#; its not a problem.
If Zuck doesn't know enough about most of his users to get debts collected, then on this Earth who does?
facebook isn't dead yet????
Fuck $100. Make it a cool $20 and the total net earnings will skyrocket.
Now I can charge Facebook $100 for every spam message they email me about 'friends' even though I removed (supposedly) my account years ago.