Oh lol. If facebook starts to promote micro transactions it will surely be the end of it for many users. I for one am not gonna pay to use facebook.
Waiting for Apple or Facebook to become the next iBank... you know how much Facebook made last year in transactions? Something like 800 million! Imagine an extra button in iTunes that said iBank... as much as a bunch of you will no doubt post detrimental replies re Apple, having just walked out of a meeting about what Barclays are doing and the PR around Apple that is banding about, don't be surprised if this is a reality in the (not to) distant future...
I don't know if I read your posts or the article incorrectly, but from what I gather I can post something and pay 25p / 50p to highlight the post so that certain friend groups see it easier, i.e. it's highlighted and attracts attention. This would be more beneficial to a business than to the average home user I would imagine. There is no mention of charging for the use of Facebook.
I hardly use mine anyway so no biggie... those people with 2000 'friends' and spend half their life on it might get the s***s
It's interesting to see this idea being rolled out for more widespread use. Facebook introduced this capability to businesses earlier this year via the Reach Generator. If it's cheap enough, I can see a lot of non-commercial entities using this feature to "promote" their own posts among their many "friends."
Its at the stage where so many people everyone knows are on it and so much planning of social life goes on via facebook, that you'd pretty much have to pay to use it, or miss out on a whole chunk of whats going on.. they've well and truly cornered the market..
That's what disgusts me but it's a part of the capitalistic economy (not that there's anything wrong with that though) I hate it when one company has so absolute control over our life. (I'm looking at you Google).
I don't believe they've cornered the market so much as the market has place them there. A social network requires users, if your friends didn't use it why would you? So it's beneficial for all users to use the same platform. At the moment Facebook is the platform of choice, but if they make themselves less attractive (such as pay to use systems) all a rival (Google+?) has to do is get enough users to seem more attractive than Facebook and start stealing users. Once the population of the new system grows it becomes exponentially more attractive to users than Facebook and eventually replaces it.
This is for kids living on the bank of mummy and daddy that want all their friends to see that they've just drank their first bottle of smirnoff ice and post it, then pay to have it top of the list. I know for a fact there are many people here that would use this feature on a regular basis. It's sort of a "look at me, look at me!" button, that costs.
Exactly! To be fair to Facebook though, it is a business at the end of the day, if it thinks it can get money from people who like to show off, then great! I do wonder where social networking will go in the future IF it integrates micro transactions into its site though.
For those saying 'why post this, they aren't saying charge to use Facebook', I know that. But they are looking to introduce something that charges to highlight posts. If that model is semi-successful, and the trend of mobile-Facebook use continues to erode the advertising revenue Facebook can draw upon, as well as the continuing slowdown of their revenue growth as already reported, what chance that this may be the thin end of the wedge? If you have hundreds of millions of captive subscribers, and all of a sudden a £1 a month levy is brought to continue subscription the majority of those will likely continue their subscription as the utility has become almost integral to their daily lives. This will bring in a huge amount of revenue for Facebook but will stop it being 'Free', as they claimed it always would be. Hey, I'm not judgin', just pointing out that perhaps saying 'Free, and it always will be' was a silly promise to make.
I'm betting this probably has something to do with their IPO and wanting to show prospective investors another potential revenue stream (given that they had to downgrade their predicted ad revenues for last year). I can't see it being any more of a hassle than the ads Twitter sticks in users' feeds at the moment. As someone who runs a small blog that depends on Facebook quite heavily for readers, I could even see myself using this to ensure 'new post' messages show up to all my friends.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I'm not on Facebook, and I don't miss any social events because I still talk to people in person. Perhaps my experience isn't the norm anymore, but even though most of my friends are Facebook addicts, they know how to get in touch with me if they want to hang out.
