the end of (facebook) innocence
Posted by popkitchen | Filed under academic, web 2.0
Facebook really took off when its creators opened it to users outside university/school networks, which was also marked with the proliferation of applications. People use Facebook to kill time, but majority use it to see what their friends are up to, to stay in touch with people, who moved away, went to school or are living in another country.
When I joined last summer, only three of my friends were on – all tied in a University network. Now, I believe there is not a person, among my friends, who is not on. The huge intake from last fall was accompanied with what now is called “application spam”. Remember the time where you could not defend yourself from all the pokes, superpokes, Top Friends, How Sexy Are You and Which Friends Character Are You applications. Some people never learn to skip that step.
In the past few months, I changed my settings, blocking invitations as much as possible, plus people stopped sending the unwanted items. Until July, there were more than 33 thousand applications available on Facebook. Aside from onslaught of applications, issues surrounding Facebook include privacy concerns, impossibility of deletion of an account or usage of data Facebook users voluntary share on their profile by marketers. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook was pronounced as one of the youngest billionaires, when Yahoo offered to buy the company for USD1bn last year, he declined. Microsoft is exclusive partner of Facebook for advertising.
So is it enough?
Apparently not. Today, it was announced that Facebook will charge developers for submission of applications, which was not the case before. Those applications will receive a “badge” guaranteeing that applications are “trust worthy, meaningful and well designed”. Tech Crunch called the USD375 annual fee “protection racket”.
As other social media, Facebook opened its API (Application Programing Interface), so that users could customize their profiles, create applications, which could increase the sense of community or promise that some money would be made this way. A British B2B company advises its users to use Facebook applications as a form of viral marketing.
“There are three main reasons for creating a Facebook app:
• Raise brand awareness – Applications spread virally, with your name and logo attached. This will not only introduce you to large numbers of users, but also put you in touch with hard-to-reach demographics.
• Direct traffic to your website – By putting links on the “canvas” of your application, you can generate traffic on Facebook and then direct it to your own site.
• Make money – Facebook itself charges nothing for you to build your application. Once the app is live, you collect the revenue from any advertisements that appear within it.”
Ok, now amend the last statement.
As it is the case with other user-generated content, people might not be making it for profit, but for a reputation (brushing up on your skills, building up on your CV), which would lead them to “real” job offers.
This news coincides with me reading Geert Lovink’s Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. Lovink is known for critical assessment of all developments on the Internet, now including web 2.0. In the introduction to his latest book, he dispels claims that web 2.0 is more democratic, by showing how Internet was used by fundamentalists, who planned and encouraged the murder of Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh. Or more free, stating that “Internet ideology makes us blind to what we actually pay, while overly happy to join the gift economy of the free”.
The issue at hand should be reformulated – not the unpaid labor on the Internet, but the labor with initial transaction costs, aside from time spent creating content, which is used by a platform to increase its membership base and monetize it.
Tags: Facebook, free labor, lovink, user-generated content, web 2.0
November 27th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
good news