In your face!
God…that was horrible. Anyways, I’ve starting messing around with Facebook. It’s like what if MySpace was relevant and not horribly fucking ugly. A friend of mine on MySpace just updated his page and I now owe him a kick in the nuts for the pain caused to my eyes. The ability of Facebook to interact with other sites you have content on is also very nice. It’s like having an online page bookmarking where you are and what you’re doing on the net.
But this got me thinking about a recent seminar another friend went to in San Francisco. They were talking about the social networks locking you in and not letting you make your circle portable. While opening up the social networks would be a fine thing, it would have to be overseen by a UN-type authority who would also hold your account information on all of the services. This would never happen because your account information is the most precious commodity the social networks have. Without this information, without knowing where you fall in the advertising spectrum, social networks would not make any income.
All of these services are free to you because they’re supported by advertising. But the advertising is geared specifically toward you. The more information you put on your page about what you like/don’t like is the kind of gold they’re looking for. It’s why that is always the most prominent information and any page missing this information is shown as blank or incomplete. This isn’t exactly news to anyone, it’s just a cold, hard fact.
Now as long as the social networks have control of this information, you are valuable on their network. They share it with advertisers who want your eyeballs for income and thus keep the servers online. But if that information is shared among a few other social networks, then the information is worth less. After all, if you’re asking for some figure …let’s make it up….$2 a profile, and someone else comes along and asks $1.75 a profile, you lose. Perhaps all of the information was entered through your page, using your resources. If that information is sent back to a central server so any social network can have your profile information available, then you just did every competitor a favor.
So what’s the answer? I don’t think there is an answer. As long as the online business is about more eyeballs for more ad revenue, then every advantage the websites can leverage to increase their bottom line is just smart business. After all…no one goes into business to give something away.
