It’s facebook official! I’m married and facebook are dancing with the devil.
Such is life, amusing these days that rumor remains just that until it appears in print on facebook. Rose and I have tied the knot, it's facebook official (Ive changed my status). It's also official that facebook have held out as long as they can from the onslaught of the advertising business model. Microsoft *yawn* are to start providing banner space *even bigger YAWN* and sponsored links *DEATH DEFYING YAWN*. One of the nice things about facebook is its clean looks. Myspace just doesn't do it for me in this regard and seems to be full of weirdos (whereas facebook is full of good wholesome members of the RIT community – at least in my social circle). I guess I'm just not sure that advertising space is the only way to go. There remain plenty of alternative models that might prove equally attractive (shock and horror – pay for access?!). Couple this with a healthy retail model, party organizing features and so on and we might have something to sing about. Banner ads and sponsored links. Dear oh dear. What is the world coming to? How mind numbingly boring.
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Text and banner ads boring? Perhaps. But they are the easiest way to make money. With the traffic facebook gets, they are about 4 clicks away from reaping thousands of dollars a month in Adsense revenue. Literally 4 clicks. Say what you will about the long term prospects of this vs doing something more resource/time consuming yet innovative, but you never know what’s going on inside their offices. They may have a sudden need for cash, or at least proof that they can make cash to keep the VC teat from drying up.
Neil, I must say I’m surprised you haven’t linked this blog to your facebook account yet. It was such an odd coincidence that when my friend and I were wondering what feature would come next with facebook, I stated it would add a blog feature. My friend told me this was preposterous. The very next morning, facebook announced the feature “Facebook notes,” allowing you to port your blog right to your facebook page (and tag the people you mention in the blog, linking readers to their accounts). It never ceases to amaze me how linked everything is becomming. Since I called it right this past time, I’ll make a prediction for the next integration feature: “[name] is listening to…” Facebook will ask to install an active X plugin to detect what media players the user has open, and report on the profile page exactly what the person is listening to currently. It will also allow users to share playlists with each other. Yahoo Music already allows you to do this. Can facebook be far behind?
Speaking of integration, I’ll soon be looking for ways to link my blog and my net presence pages to the newly registered http://chrisjadams.net.
I guess Chris wasn’t that far off with the integration features… can we say mini-feeds? http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/fashion/10FACE.html “Let Facebook do the stalking for you… keep tabs on friends 24-7 as they reveal their life to the world” Great idea for those that don’t mind spilling all to the world, however, with the lack of privacy controls it was a horrible market execution for those who didn’t want to. (Although the latter really needs to come to the realization that anything posted online is not private- as you proved in our Internet Marketing class with the Facebook photos dispersed through the PowerPoint presenations)