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."
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.
"It’s free and always will be."
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
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.
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...
Just pay $1.59* and exercise your right to free speech!
... compensate for your brazen use of the First Amendment.
Oh, come on. I dislike Facebook as much as the next person, but what "free speech" and what "first amendment" are you talking about??
Facebook is a private enterprise. Until they are a government agency (not yet), free speech/1st amendment does not apply. Totally irrelevant
This might not even be a money grabbing move as much as "rich people should have their privacy" despite being on Facebook. M.Z. had one of his family Thanksgiving photos published against his wishes recently -- he was pretty annoyed about that.
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'll just use e-mail instead.
mark.zuckerberg@fb.com
mzuckerberg@fb.com
or just dial the weasel directly...
(650) 543-4800 x9825
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!
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.
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 .
Reminds me of the diamond ring item in Team Fortress 2. Costs a hundred bucks and when you uses it you essentially propose to another player in front of everyone logged in. To this day (like a year or more after inception) you still see people using it for memes or general trolling and what have you.
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.
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?
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.
"most used" and "best" are not necessarily the same thing.
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?
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!
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
The barrier to switch is NOT nil. If your network of friends is on Facebook then switching means losing all your contacts or persuading them (and all their friends ad infinitum) to switch. People have invested in the service, and even if it's really shitty and people grouse about it, they'll stick with it.