Facebook Tests the Waters With Paid Perks 204
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.
Freemium at its best (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Who is stalking me? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Facebook should pay popular users. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:4, Interesting)
Users who generate a lot of page views are rewarded.
This encourages users to create more and hopefully "better" (in terms of interest to their audience) posts.
In turn this draws more page views and makes Facebook more money.
Actually if Facebook was wise they would simply give you a private ranking on your post, how many views a picture or wall post garnered to encourage you to do more.
Facebook users love collecting things: friends, likes, Farmville items...give them another virtual currency: views!
Re:"You're doing it wrong" (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Haven't used Facebook for 12 weeks. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Determined to repeat MySpace's mistakes (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Freemium at its best (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Freemium at its best (Score:5, Interesting)
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.