Hey Facebook, here are some ways to make money

Facebook is not doing well economically, but they have an awful lot of users; probably a billion users soon. They can't survive indefinitely without making money. Here are some ideas for them.

1. Facebook will not be able to get enough money from selling ads, the way they do it now. For research I clicked on four ads just to see what would happen. Two of them were probably from crooked companies, because they led me via strange links to gambling sites. 
2. They could sell a different type of ad. Clicking on it would only lead you to the company's FB page and that page would of course give you the intended message. Any links from that page would be forbidden. This arrangement would increase user's confidence in Facebook ads and more of them would be sold. It would also keep users within Facebook. 
3. Facebook should try to get a user fee from its users. It would be a small sum for private users and a lot more for companies. It would still be possible to get FB for free, but there would be a price tag on some things. One thing people value is privacy, so a lot of privacy would cost. Big corporations would pay perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars. 
4. Facebook could create a FB app store. They might take 30% of earnings. 
5. They could generate a summary of user posts (over some user-selected time-period) and friend's posts and sell it as a nice hardcopy to the user; a sort of photo-book with lots of pictures and text. I'd suggest they buy some existing photo service provider. 
6. They could encourage schools to use Facebook for teacher-parent communication. Schools would have to pay for this service. Of course security would have to be much improved, because here it's essential. 

If you see some of this happening, remember you read it here first ;-)

About Google+, again

Hi all social webbers!
In a previous post I was speculating about Google+ and what it looked like. I found out it looks very much like Facebook. Look at this screen-shot from
http://www.businessinsider.com/wow-google-looks-exactly-like-facebook-2011-6





This looks pretty good. We know from Facebook that the formula works. Whether it will work for Google or not is a matter of outperforming Facebook and attracting enough users. Google already has quite a lot to offer, like Google Docs, search, gmail, buzz, reader, YouTube. If they buy Twitter or integrate it nicely, Google+ will likely have what it take to outperform Facebook. The rest is up to goodwill. Do we like Google enough? A few years ago the answer would have been a YESSSS, but now there's doubt. They are really big and are becoming increasingly controversial. A bit like Microsoft actually.

Has Google hired Jack Byrnes?

Google+ is Google's new attempt to create something social. If successful, it should help Google to remain among the top sites on the web.


If you've seen the brilliant Ben Stiller films "Meet the Parents" or "Meet the Fockers" or "Little Fockers", then you know Jack Byrnes, the father-in-law of Gaylord (Greg) Focker. Jack has his circles of trust and you'd better be in the right circle.
When I first heard of the circles within Google+ I smiled, because I immediately recognized it from those films. The concept makes sense. Jack Byrnes explained it to us all in his first private and very tense talk with Greg Focker, so I'm fairly sure I understand it.


Further Google+ elements are as follows:

• Huddle is group-chat. 
• Hangouts seems to be a video-version of Huddle.
• Instant Upload is auto-upload to the web and picture-sharing.
• Sparks is Google's version of StumbleUpon. It sends you stuff you're likely to appreciate, to make sure you always have something interesting to read.

The big questions is: will this work?


We'll know it works if Facebook starts to lose its grip on us and we start creating circles and enjoy sparks and start hanging out in the Google way.


Here's what I think, starting with Facebook. When I'm busy with Facebook, I'm Facebooking. That means I go to the site or open the iPad app and I start browsing my Facebook news. I'm constantly aware that I'm Facebooking, because whatever action I take, I will remain within the world of Facebook.
This is quite different from Googling. To google is to search. I go to Google's site and type something and get search results. I click on a result and that takes me to some site, just any site, and it's probably nothing to do with Google. The click took me away from Google and I will only return to Google if I want to search further.


For Google+ to be a success, Google needs to hang on to us somehow. It seems they will not try to copy Facebook and that's good. Instead they will keep throwing as many excellent services at us as they can think of and hope we're interested. If we are then Google increases its relevance to us, which adds extra meaning to googling. That's what I think Google+ may be about.
However, they may be trying something more like Facebook after all. If so, they will collect all those services into one site and try to get you to the point where "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave" (Eagles). 
We'll see.