Facebook tests $1 fee for inbox access
news.cnet.com
news.cnet.com
This is particularly interesting:
If you select Strict Filtering, you'll see mostly messages from friends in your Inbox. People who had the previous setting set to "friends" will have "Strict Filtering" on.
Basically now you cannot opt out of getting messages from someone who pays facebook to message you. Interesting.
Stuff like that makes it easy to not depend on the site for anything.
I ended up bringing it to the bank branch nearest where I found the wallet (Bank of America) who was also unhelpful. They told me that unless the wallet had been found in their branch they wouldn't contact the owner even though it had her name and photo on the bank card. Because of their unwillingness to help, I vowed to never become a customer of Bank of America.
You should have said, "Okay, thanks", thrown the wallet towards the exit, walked over and picked it up, and walked back over to the counter.
"Hey, I just found this wallet over by the exit."
I feel like this is a problem and I'm kind of disappointed Facebook did this without any notification or indication. Cancelling my credit card was annoying and it's more annoying that there is nothing I can do to fix this in the future.
For those who don't use Facebook, if you receive a message from someone who is not your "friend", it goes into a different folder called "Other". Many people don't know about this and there's no notification in the UI for received messages. Visually, it's treated in a similar way to your spam folder but with less visibility.
I always assumed that the only reason for separating your Other folder so visually was to charge people to get out of it. I guess Facebook was waiting for more people to use their messaging platform as a replacement for email before pulling the trigger.
Puzzled why anyone at Facebook thinks this is a remotely good idea, but you know, business model.
$1 a message is a one followed by the zeros you get from your cat playing with the zero key times more expensive than bulk spam.
Let's use some vary pessimistic estimates.
183 billion spam messages a day * 1% make it to inbox / 10,000 people world wide making spam / 5$ per person per day = 36,600 messages dollar. Which need to be vary garbled to make it though the inbox so they tend to be instantly ignored by most people.
PS: I have seen more detailed estimates that suggest each read spam message costs .1c to 10c depending on how targeted the campaign is.
What happens next, pay Facebook $10/month so others can't pay them $1 per message to spam you?
But if they feel their message is THAT important, perhaps they'd then pay $1.20 to ensure you get it...
It's also (again, currently) "not available to Brands."
I can already do this by paying $20 to upgrade to an unlimited SMS plan on my phone.
Sure, if you measure your performance on true positives. But what about false positives? What if I and the recipient will gain utility from me sending him a message, but I refuse to pay a dollar to ensure he will see it?
I think google proved algorithmic spam protection works well. It may not work perfectly (and IMO has gotten slightly worse over time), but it gets you pretty darn close without adding a tax. Automatic protection feels far more 'efficient' than the proposed one. I hope facebook's trial proves this.
I suppose there could be a case where the utility to you is low, but the utility to the user is very high, but in this case they are probably seeking you out and you should invest in cost-per-click/conversion advertising instead of cost-per-impression.
Facebook's proposed model has a very high cost-per-impression, which is what weeds out much of the spam. You have to get a very high conversion rate before it becomes economical, which implies that the message was indeed relevant. In fact, being an inbox message probably increases the conversion rate over other communication methods (such as ads and spam)
Anyway, I get virtually zero e-mail spam and my e-mail address has been public for eight years. I don't see why facebook wants to shake things up. I consider spam a mostly solved problem.
"We have given people meaningful privacy controls to prevent unwanted messages, but we let other people completely override them for small amounts of money"
It's not like you get to pull a name out of thin air and message it for a dollar, it tells you things about people you can't normally reach (IE normally have you blocked from sending messages), and lets you decide if you want to reach them anyway, despite the fact that you are normally blocked/put into other.
The wonderful spin they put on this is: "For the receiver, this test allows them to hear from people who have an important message to send them."
That important message could be "i'm stalking you, bitch", being sent from a throwaway facebook account. As the article points out it also allows you to send messages to people you aren't friends with, so you don't even have to have gotten them to friend you. Normally it would have gone into other and you'd likely never have looked.
[1] Though i think you can probably see this it the next step if this test is "successful". Recommending to advertisers that they spend X dollars to get into the inbox of X people who share Y interest.
But you are dismissing a perfectly legitimate use. I had no idea there even existed an "Other" folder and when I did find out, there were a half dozen legitimate mails from longlost friends of various types.
I can see the privacy concern here but to call the above "spin" is being ignorant to a very legitimate use case. The $1/msg seems like an interesting compromise - if someone legitimate really wanted to reach me, they probably wouldn't mind spending a dollar.
If i have a setting that says "i only want to hear from friends", then i only want to hear from friends. That's the choice I am making about who i want to hear from. You can argue i'm not thinking this choice through, or am ignorant of the consequences, but that's not the same argument.
If they want a setting for "I also want to hear from people who are willing to spend money to reach me" (or some better pr worded version of this), great, i'm not opposed to that.
The entire point of this exercise is to address zaidf's use case, which is trying to attach importance to messages that are outside the realm of Facebook's "important" data points. If they aren't your friend, and they aren't a friend of your friends', but they still have an important message -- how can we identify this?
The obvious hope here is that they can identify important messages by attaching a small (but real) cost to them, while limiting abuse by way of rates and maybe tweaking the cost.
You may not want these messages, but the fact remains that there are important messages that go missed because they can't smartly be deemed "important" in the Facebook ecosystem. Maybe there are sinister intentions beneath the surface, but this is still a legitimate attempt to solve a legitimate problem.
I am sure that even when they roll out this feature, they will give you an option to turn it off just as users right now can remove the Message Me button from non-friends entirely.
You seem to assume that facebook can or should be the way to reach people who have explicitly said "friends only" for their facebook messages.
Again, if i've said "i only want to see messages from friends", and something "important" goes missed as a result, that is the tradeoff I chose. The rest of this argument seems to be "you chose the wrong tradeoff or we think you don't really understand what you are doing so we are doing our best to surface stuff that you explicitly said you didn't care about"
It will be difficult for FB to really win in advertising spaces; there are a lot of other players. FB is making a play that states that there's an unserved market in sending personal messages to people who don't want them. They're probably right, it's only unclear how big that market might be.
The best part? Once users tire of sponsored messages ending up in their "email", FB can offer a paid option to exclude them. If that works, then FB gets paid.
As Mr. McBean said, "you can't teach a Sneetch", at least not quickly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Stories
EDIT: Let me explain...LinkedIn is about to make just shy of 1 billon in revenue in 2012. Their dominant revenue stream is recruiting products where orgs/recruiters pay ~10K a year per seat to search linkedin and send X number of InMails a month. As developers this product is the source of much of the job spam you get each week.. Facebook has all the same connections/work exp/education that LinkedIn has...just for more people.