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.
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.