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This is just the latest revision of AOL Keywords. How did that work out for them?
This is just the latest revision of MySpace pages too.
MySpace band pages were the rage a few years ago. Times change. The MySpace pages at least provided value for both sides--you could hear the music and the bands could let you know about shows. Most business pages I've seen on Facebook are one sided in that the fan gets nothing out of it other than letting all their friends know what corporation they are a "fan" of.
Though I imagine most pages are not quite so well utilized. These are all small, local businesses.
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Sad but I've got the same impression. The scariest bit for me is that people with whom I was exchanging emails, are now sending me FB messages instead. That is to say they already have my email address, it's there probably memorised in their email app, and yet they use FB. That's one scary power FB got there. Suddenly email is not open anymore. (Though I don't blame FB for it: they did business, didn't force it down…
What scares me is the other week I sent a Facebook message that should have been an email, largely because a different friend in the same social circle had sent me a Facebook message on a similar subject. It's really hard to use Facebook without it taking total control of your social interaction.
Scary. That's centralization to a degree I hardly imagine. I hope this will fail.
For better or worse.
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The appeal to businesses is clear. The appeal to users could be social ("What brands do I associate myself with?") or promotion-related ("Become our 1,000,000th fan and get this free thing!", "Facebook-exclusive discount!"). Also I don't think Facebook lets you put in bio information (favorite movies, etc.) anymore without it linking to a page.
Facebook's increasing focus on business customers will be at the detriment of regular users, who will be demoted to the rank of mere 'consumers'. It's a subtle - but important - distinction. Facebook's decision-making will increasingly be driven by thinking like "how can we monetize all this wealth of consumer data" or "how can we introduce tiered fanpage packages to business customers as a revenue stream" rather tha…
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What scares me is the other week I sent a Facebook message that should have been an email, largely because a different friend in the same social circle had sent me a Facebook message on a similar subject. It's really hard to use Facebook without it taking total control of your social interaction.
Use Opera, some things on Facebook break and then you'll prefer email rather than launching another browser. Works for me!
Personally, I think Facebook's killer app is that it fixed email. For a huge population, email never worked very well, mostly since they had to find out someone else's email to talk to them. Facebook fixes this completely for any personal email use - all your real-life friends are friends on Facebook. I'm guessing a huge percentage of personal mail has moved from email to Facebook messages - does anyone have any data…
There are still other e-mail features FB private messages don't offer: forwarding message threads, attachments, email subscriptions, etc.)
Personally, I think Facebook's killer app is that it fixed email. For a huge population, email never worked very well, mostly since they had to find out someone else's email to talk to them. Facebook fixes this completely for any personal email use - all your real-life friends are friends on Facebook. I'm guessing a huge percentage of personal mail has moved from email to Facebook messages - does anyone have any data…
Hmm, facebook mail is absolutely horrid. It's a combination of spam messages and just contact that I will never read. I have 1000+ unread messages. I actually read a fb message in my normal email box and if it's something actually valuable, ill then respond on FB.
I personally don't see the appeal of Facebook pages. The only function I can see of "liking" any of these pages is to give Facebook more information so they can try to sell you more stuff.
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Facebook's increasing focus on business customers will be at the detriment of regular users, who will be demoted to the rank of mere 'consumers'. It's a subtle - but important - distinction. Facebook's decision-making will increasingly be driven by thinking like "how can we monetize all this wealth of consumer data" or "how can we introduce tiered fanpage packages to business customers as a revenue stream" rather tha…
I didn't fully get your point earlier, but it's clearer now. You raise valid points. By the way, two points that may interest you: (1) I personally filter my facebook stream to weed out all the "spammy auto-updates" you've mentioned - so it feels a lot more 'human' to me. I get exactly what you mean (mafia wars is a pet peeve) (2) The whole thing about the Dunbar number- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
Forcing users to 'prune' their status updates is in fact a symptom of something broken in the user experience. I check into Facebook every now and again, and I shouldn't to have to act like a gardener who has ignored his back yard for a month. A lot of status updates are incredibly frivolous too - Facebook's culture is not suited to my taste I guess. Virtually all of my (Facebook) friends are not hacker types and will post "I'm bored" or "feeling tired" or something equally awe-inspiring. Granted, this is something that Facebook would have never solved as they are trying to appeal to the mainstream, not early adopters. I love the fact that by logging onto HN I often learn something new, and quickly learn to a) write well and b) only talk about stuff you are knowledgeable about. Anything else and you will get caught out pretty quickly.
(2) The whole thing about the Dunbar number
This had occurred to me also when writing the original comment, but I didn't mention it as I don't see a decline as inevitable as an online community grows in size - I believe HN is proof of that. By deliberately appealing only to a narrow segment of the internet population through a strict, human-enforced culture (see HN guidelines), and allowing users to only maintain very loose ties if any with each other (contact info in your HN profile for example), it's possible to have meaningful, no-spam interaction on an online community. Pg mentioned recently that HN now gets something like 60k uniques per day. I've been on HN for quite a while and I think the quality of article and comments has been consistent over time. I think the Paul Buchheit philosophy of building something that a small number of people love, and that most people would hate (HN), rather than something that tries to appeal to everyone (Facebook) comes into play here. See my below comment on the 'tribes' concept for a possible solution to this problem in a social networking context. I believe it would work as it models how people organise themselves into groups in real life.