A very extensive Facebook snapshot
By any measure, Facebook’s growth is a great accomplishment. The crew of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s 24-year-old co-founder and chief executive, is signing up nearly a million new members a day, and now more than 70 percent of the service’s members live overseas, in countries like Italy, the Czech Republic and Indonesia. Facebook’s ranks in those countries swelled last year after the company offered its site in their languages.
All of this mojo puts Facebook on a par with other groundbreaking — and wildly popular — Internet services like free e-mail, Google, the online calling network Skype and e-commerce sites like eBay. But Facebook promises to change how we communicate even more fundamentally, in part by digitally mapping and linking peripatetic people across space and time, allowing them to publicly share myriad and often very personal elements of their lives.
1 comment:
Instead of counting on people to become fans of products and companies, it would make good sense for facebook to do a better job tailoring ads to user's interests. They definitely have a lot of information at their disposal to target as precisely as possible--as Google has tried to do with its ads (where advertisers only pay if the ads are clicked on), but even better.... Dr. John Tantillo has a marketing blog on which he always insists that real marketing is communication with the consumer--rather than 'smoke and mirrors.'
If ads were targeted to users, taking into account all the information in a user's profile, I doubt the consumers would resent the ads... Currently, there's an option to say you "do" or "don't" like a certain ad, but since we know we have to see some ads anyway, I think that some of us would be wiling to fill something out indicating the types of ads we would be more interested in seeing. (ex. If my favorite author's new book just went on sale and there's a link to buy it on amazon....I wouldn't mind... I might even be glad for the ad, since it's something I'd want to spend my money on anyway.)
In a recent post., Tantillo pointed out that Facebook could have at least done test runs of the newest version of facebook to get feedback before actually launching it....or take the advantage of free and voluntary labor by allowing users to contribute under a wiki sort of setup.
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