Saturday, June 07, 2014

Facebook: Creating a Legacy or Just Another Money Grubbing Company Trying to hit this Quarter's Numbers

Chris Crum wrote a go1od article about  Facebook Says Your Organic Reach Would Be Worse If It Showed Everything In The News Feed . He starts it  like this (Paraphrased):

Facebook’s Brian Boland wrote a blog post about the decline in organic reach of Facebook  posts. It’s happening for two reasons: more and more content is created and shared every day and News Feed tries to show users content that’s the most relevant to them.

Neither article makes the point of what Facebook should do if they were a customer driven player who wanted to be popular, useful, and around for the long term. Instead, I feel that Facebook is acting like a money grubbing firm more worried about the next quarters earnings than cementing their potential long term legacy..

Here's more free advice for Facebook:

1.  Give the people control over their own news feed.  This is easy, just put in settings a new section which gives users some parameters and choices:
- How many items do you want a day (this could be a percent, a number, just a slider towards more or less).
-  Rate which of these people/groups/pages you want to see more or less of?
- Are you OK with the current number of ads you are seeing? If you want less, pay here.
etc etc

2. Find a business model which is not built on selling privacy and on intrusive ads. I know you covet Google's advertising-driven model. Yes, it's good. But it's best for search. Advertising plus search, natural fit.  Advertising and information selling plus social, BAD FIT.  While there is room here in some ways to make money, your aggressive behavior in this area is pissing us all off and making us think about how we can get rid of you.

My first idea for Facebook's business model was to turn into an archiving service where we store our pictures and videos.  For $10 a month, store all you want. It's a great ongrowing business.  Plus you can buy/create a little shutterfly / cafe press - type business. If you do it right, you can be profitable like all those game companies that give out free games but live well off the 1% who want to spend money on all of them.

My new idea is that as social merges with mobile, there's something in the GPS / Yelp / Find friends area that can be very profitable.   I actually have some good thoughts here but I'll let them percolate for awhile