FB is testing payment for post prominence, thus breaking the “always free promise”:
I have no problem with post promotion. I have a problem with paid post promotion. If this goes through, it will ruin Facebook.
If you consider that scores of imbeciles pay for virtual pitchforks on Zynga, they might as well pay for post promotion. But smart people will not submit to the suits and Goldman, get annoyed again, and leave.
The FB walled garden is perhaps the biggest threat to Internet freedom.
I agree: Even after FBs eventual decline and failure it will have conditioned many (young) users into using a central portal to get their information, where curated and censored information is all they’ll expect to get. This is worse than the AOL of yesteryear as FBs requires a much deeper personal involvement from “members”.
Facebook may be making us lonely, giving users the information age equivalent of a faceless suburban wasteland, claims the fantastic cover story of The Atlantic. Key excerpts:
We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.
At the forefront of all this unexpectedly lonely interactivity is Facebook.
Facebook makes real relationships harder:
That one little phrase, Your real friends—so quaint, so charmingly mothering—perfectly encapsulates the anxieties that social media have produced: the fears that Facebook is interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making us lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very isolation it seemed designed to conquer.
Here’s why:
Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy. The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society—the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall.
Finally, FB fosters a retreat into narcissism:
Self-presentation on Facebook is continuous, intensely mediated, and possessed of a phony nonchalance that eliminates even the potential for spontaneity. (“Look how casually I threw up these three photos from the party at which I took 300 photos!”) Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation.
Facebook users retreat from “messy” human interaction and spend too much of their time curating fantasy avatars of themselves to actually to out and meet real people:
The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee.
The always-on effects are profound:
What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.
One of the deepest and best researched meditations on FB 2012.
Harsh words, but important insights, destined to be largely ignored by the herd:
“Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record,” Moglen said of the founder of Facebook. “He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.”
Why? Because, Moglen said, Mark Zuckerberg had harnessed the energy of our social desires to talk us into a swindle. “Everybody needs to get laid,” Moglen said. “He turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality, and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, ‘I will give you free Web hosting and some PHP doodads, and you get spying for free all the time.’”
[…]
But as the business press and slavering investors look on eagerly at Zuckerberg’s coronation, many believe that the seeds of Facebook’s downfall have already been sown. The company might have brought people together like never before, but exploitation is woven inextricably into its DNA. Facebook makes its money by commercializing personal information, watching its users, analyzing their behavior, and selling what it learns.
[…]
What you share and what you click on affects what Facebook knows about your friends, too. And in the aggregate, all this personal information helps build a machine that can know the past and present and make good guesses about the future, a machine whose insights are incredibly valuable to everyone from corporations to state-intelligence services.
[…]
What makes Facebook so valuable isn’t the Web ads it serves up, but rather the unprecedented amount of information it has about its users, which it can then sell to third parties. Business intelligence—the data a company can scrape together about its customers—is the fastest-growing segment of enterprise computing. Major tech companies are snapping up companies that make business-intelligence software. But the software that does the data mining is only a tool—what really matters is how much data you have. And Facebook has a lot.
[…]
In Europe at least, Facebook’s users are becoming increasingly aware that Facebook is first and foremost a surveillance mechanism, and they don’t like it. If that realization spreads, Facebook’s most precious asset—its users—could stampede and flee to a safer network.
The societal vanguard will lead the way, out of Facebook and government control, into federated, more open, user-controlled systems that allow for anonymity and privacy.
I think the “dot com boom 2.0″ has begun. There seems to be so much emotional and reactionary money on the street – especially around this deal. Does no one have a memory of 10 years ago? Valuations based on nothing? Millions spent on vaporware?
[…]
The latest reports is that “boutique” communities are far more popular than the broad appeal of “friending” one fifth of the planet.
[…]
This is more of the same over-hyped dot com crap that people are still licking their wounds over from a decade ago. Is Facebook popular because it is mostly “free” and free of the advertising clutter of so many other sights? Yes. As a public company, they will not be able to keep the focus on the “user experience” by monetizing as many parts of Facebook as possible. Frankly, it is the same tired company arc we’ve seen played out – but because of the size and the media attention – somehow, we think that the rules don’t apply to them. Companies are companies and people are people.
[…]
I would say look for Facebook to depopulate severely in the next 12 – 18 months. Right now is their “highpoint” in terms of total registered users – now it’s all trying to cash-in on the eyeballs that haven’t found other ways to express themselves on-line.
[…]
College kids are already leaving in droves – next will be the casual users who don’t want to be “bothered” with the fees and subscriptions that will be coming followed by the “hard core” who see the wave of fees as a betrayal to the culture of Facebook.
The timing of the IPO (hype) is astute, but it will indeed be the pinnacle of FB.
NYT:
The company’s [Facebook's] flubs in this area [privacy] reveal a fundamental tension in the way sophisticated ad-supported sites work. Consumers’ time and information are effectively the price they pay for free Web services. Facebook allows its users to keep up with far-flung friends and family, for instance, in exchange for that information.
The new no-opt-out Big-Brother-friendly timeline feature is a boon for identity thieves, but also for Facebook and its advertisers:
EPIC’s letter also specifically mentions the Timeline “Health and Wellness” category, which suggests that users should update their profiles with life events related to medical changes. Facebook has partnered with pharmaceutical companies to market drugs and medical treatment to consumers, and EPIC sees a clear—and worrisome– connection.
That IPO is gonna fly off the pharmacy shelves.
Also: Less than two months after settling with the FTC and agreeing to let users opt-in to privacy changes, FB forces massive changes on members.
The article is a must read in its entirety.
Facebook currently has more than 800 million users. Any company of this size is sure to have some detractors. Compared to other leading social media sites, however, Facebook has the lowest customer satisfaction score from the American Customer Satisfaction Index. The site has repeatedly irked users by neglecting personal privacy. Notable events include the introduction of facial recognition software, which spurred an investigation by the European Union, and the Facebook timeline. Facebook received significant negative press for forcing new settings on users that changes how their personal information is shared with others. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has only recently said that the company will no longer do this. According to the MSN Money-IBOPE Zogby International customer service survey for 2011, 25.9% of Facebook users described the company’s customer service as “poor” — the lowest rating.
“Without anonymity, the human race will not be human anymore.”
“Ever morning I see people wearing dog collars, reporting their location every 90 seconds to Steven P. Jobs.”
Alas, it may already be too late.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/12/how-can-i-stop-facebook-following-me-around-the-web/#comments
Great advice and deep info about the the new Big Brother Microsoft, going into IPO year 2012.
Quote:
Friends don’t let friends use facebook……
Nice.