You see stories like this one, and you wonder how Facebook is continuing to make it. So many people I know are either leaving, or reducing their involvement (including myself), that is seems it is destined to be the next MySpace.
Over the past couple years, I have seen companies advertise themselves by giving links like facebook.com/MyCompany. When it’s in addition to you “real” website (MyCompany.com), that’s not a bad thing.
But when it’s the only outlet you give people to interact with you? You’re outsourcing your business to someone else, and hoping they don’t screw you over.
That doesn’t seem to smart to me.
I understand Facebook needs to make money – they are a business, and not a charity (and even if they were the latter, they still need to pay for electricity, engineers, and equipment). But I think that the pure advertising model is not as lucrative as it once was.
Which makes me wonder how successful a subscription-based social network could be: call it something nominal – maybe $10-20 a year, but give users much fuller control over their “experience”: a mashup of MySpace’s crazy customizability, Facebook’s interface, and LinkedIn’s professionalism.
It’s a thought. Anyone want to build one with me?
Interesting idea, it’d need a lot of awesome tuning to be worth paying for. It’d probably have to be free for non-businesses, and charge a subscription for businesses. Otherwise, why pay for access to a social network when there are plenty of free options, particularly ones your friends are already on?
You’d have to make it insanely easy to adjust how much of what you see, along with who all can see what, and give a level of customization that’s never been done before without it being intimidating or too much work. Maybe something like dynamic visability lists where you can say something like “All my friends that went to Elon and are living in the central NC area”, or “Everyone on both my ‘Development’ and ‘Friends’ lists, or “Everyone on my co-workers lists – the people on my ‘Job X’ list” to name a few examples.
Dynamic visibility – a good term, btw – is somewhat akin to what G+ does with being able to certain Circles.
I’d like to be able to exclude business traffic, unless you explicitly ask for it, which is something the book of the face fails to do.
Google and Facebook start to do this, but I’d like a lot more power into the who can see, who can’t see, combining the 2. (Facebook can do “people on this list” and “not people on this list” simultaneously, but I’d love an intersection of 2 lists option for instance).
As for business traffic, I’d say no promoted posts (or paid posts, whatever), but businesses can create a page and use it like a regular consumer, for a fee (that’d be where the money comes from, not charging individual users, who by and large would likely balk).
By the way, app.net is built around that idea. The opened a free tier not long ago, but originally it was subscription-based for everybody.
I’ve never been able to figure out what app.net was about – maybe that’s why 🙂
The quick answer is it’s a “what if Twitter decided to make money from subscriptions rather than ads” experiment. Now I think it’s a communications platform for broadcasting data for people with accounts on the service, which I never got because I wasn’t going to pay for a social network with no one I knew on the service.