Contributors

Monday, May 21, 2012

Planet of the Valley Girls?

Last week Facebook went public. Its IPO netted the company $38 a share, making it worth more than $100 billion (and earning $176 million for the banks that handled the underwriting). That's more than companies that sell real products to real people, like McDonald's, VISA, Volkswagen and Disney. Even after Disney made hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide with a single smash hit movie a couple of weeks ago.

But at this writing Facebook's stock is worth $33 a share. Many people expected its share price to jump tremendously in value, like LinkedIn's did. That hasn't happened yet, and the banks who issued the IPO may be betting against people who bought the stock. Facebook has yet to come up with a way to make the kind of money off its users that such a high value could justify. It doesn't yet push ads to mobile devices, and more than half of Facebook users access the social network through their phones. Yet doing that could alienate users and discourage them from using the service.

Facebook likes to brag that it's got almost a billion users. That number is deceptive. You can make any number of Facebook accounts, so that number could be almost anything. This is an important point because advertisers pay for their ads to be seen by real people.

Companies generate buzz on Facebook with "likes." They often have promotions to get people to like them, giving them something in an on-line game or entering them in an iPad drawing.

There are also companies that for a fee will generate likes for companies that want to increase their apparent Facebook popularity. The question is, how real are those likes? Are they simply thousands of phony Facebook accounts, or thousands of real Facebook users who are liking someone because they're paid to? It seems that if you're paying for likes, they're all fake, no matter how they're generated. Facebook is trying to root out fake likes, but it's a non-trivial problem.

So what's the point of Facebook for companies? Does it have any real value, or is it just another MySpace or AOL?

Then there's the question of what people actually use Facebook for. Every time I look at my feed I see that several friends checked in through FourSquare. I see pictures of pets and kids and what people ate for dinner. I get harangued by friends to try out some on-line game. I see articles that other people read. I see political rants. I see cryptic numbers from a neighbor that might be geo-tagging or bible study or a terrorist plot.

This is what thirteen-year-old girls do: obsess about what all their friends are doing and wearing and saying. Now full-grown adults are fretting about how many friends they have. Just recently a friend wondered why a mutual friend had defriended him. Is Facebook devolving the entire planet into, like, Valley Girls? Don't we have more important, or at least interesting, things to do?


Facebook is extending their grasp beyond their site into every nook and cranny of the Internet. Your Facebook login can be used on thousands of websites, allowing Facebook to track your every move. And this grasp is extending into the real world, because millions of people are using their mobile phones to tell Facebook where they are at every waking moment.


My Facebook feed also tells me what videos one friend watched, that another friended someone I've never heard of and another liked some company. And yesterday I saw an ad for Zoosk that said one of my acquaintances was looking for single women. I wonder if he has a girlfriend who saw the same ad?

It's these things that may ultimately be Facebook's downfall. Facebook plans to make its money by pimping out your personal data. Do you really want to be Mark Zuckerberg's whore?

2 comments:

Markadelphia said...

Why not? I'm already Obama's whore...

juris imprudent said...

If you don't get anything of value out of Facebook, why do you have an account?