I could not disagree more. Facebook is rapidly replacing email, phone, and other channels as the method that many people use to keep up with friends and family. My parents and literally hundreds of their friends have started using it over the last six months and now use it aggressively. These people are definitely not early adopters or anything...most of them are conservative midwesterners in their 40s and 50s, and most of them are very active on a daily basis, using everything from status updates to photo uploads.
Facebook hasn't figured out how to monetize their userbase yet, but the social utility value is enormous.
The other side of the coin I've been trying to preach. Left and right you see Facebook making some kind of big marketing maneuver, some new ad partner.
Maybe I'm naive to this new wave of web based business, but how has Facebook managed to partner up with Microsoft, and all of these other ad providers and not raise a single dime?
I understand what you're saying, but anytime you have hundreds of millions of people using a service, there are lots of ways that you can add value without undermining the primary utility; in many cases you can actually enhance it.
Facebook DOES have utility and value, it just is for the users and not the advertisers.
It is a self-updating white pages, and college organizations use groups in place of their own websites and mailing lists to great effect. When I want to invite 20 people to a poker tournament, text messages or facebook are the way. These things are all valuable to me.
But that doesn't mean that advertising is the right revenue model. Getting those guys to come over and pay $10 to play poker is about all the money you will get out of my group of friends on any given friday night. $5 is often the buy in as we get deeper into the semester.
I really think start ups need to stop being so adverse to charging money. The freemium model works. I don't buy a damn thing from the advertisers on facebook, but I paid $25 for the Remember the Milk app for my iPod because it is so valuable to me.
The question is: what does Facebook have to offer that they could monetize? They've offered their core services for free for so long, they'd get hurt if they started charging for any of it. And they could try to rip off the App Store, but not many Facebook apps are very good.
I observe the same thing with Facebook's local analog in my country. People who doesn't know what the Google is (it is hard to imagine but there are such people) are actively using the online social network (status updates, photo uploads).
Exactly. Facebook is very close to becoming a communications company. In fact they're not even that different than a walled-garden carrier. Both companies are aiming for the same target, they just have different starting assets...
You'd be surprised how many people you know after 50 years of life...you'd also be surprised how many of them are on Facebook.
Granted, a lot of those people aren't close friends or family members. Many of them are people that my parents knew decades ago and have lost touch with. I actually think that one of the most valuable things about Facebook (and twitter) is that it allows you to more effortlessly keep in touch with more people than 1-to-1 communication methods like email, phone, IM, etc.
I could not disagree more. Facebook is rapidly replacing email, phone, and other channels as the method that many people use to keep up with friends and family. My parents and literally hundreds of their friends have started using it over the last six months and now use it aggressively. These people are definitely not early adopters or anything...most of them are conservative midwesterners in their 40s and 50s, and most of them are very active on a daily basis, using everything from status updates to photo uploads.
Facebook hasn't figured out how to monetize their userbase yet, but the social utility value is enormous.