Some of you miss a point that everything that is on Facebook is owned by Facebook. No serious business will give up exclusive rights to their online presence to another company. This model doesn’t even make sense.
And they never had this model - the fan page registration page is plain and simple, and assumes I even understand what they’re offering. If they’re trying to make people use this instead of creating real websites, they’re doing a terrible job at it.
Compare that to their advertising and developer pages and their priorities become very clear: gain exposure by offering web developers tools to integrate on their existing websites and sell the eye balls to advertisers. That’s their model.
Getting people to use FB is not becoming the Internet. Getting developers to use FB tools for their websites is not becoming the Internet. Getting businesses to use FB to connect to their customers and prospects is not becoming the Internet.
The smart thing to do would be to continue focusing on what is working. The stupid thing to do would be trying to become the Internet. Unless FB is run by two mice.
For a free website, many businesses would give up their copyrights to the content they post. Regarding e-commerce or other more complex web technologies… if Facebook goes that route, you can be sure they would revise their T&C to reflect the proper terms a business would expect from such a relationship.
It’s not just copyrights to the content, it’s about the ownership and control. Having another company being able to shut you down at their whim is not good business sense.
Free hosts exist but there’s a reason why no serious business would use one. I don’t see why that would change with Facebook if they offered something like that.
I couldn’t agree more. However, IF it will “really” happen - that facebook will try to make pages more personalized for e-commerce use then I think only business owners with no experience on building or running websites for their business (online or offline) will buy for that. Consider it my stupid theory for this subject.
I also don’t use facebook for advertising. I think it is only better for communication and connections. Google still has the best advertising mechanisms.
We are already seeing Facebook compete with Google ads and now Google has responded with Google Plus One. I think that Facebook more then Microsoft is a bigger threat to Google.
Facebook, Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, Amazon, and Twitter are unique services with little overlap.
I don’t think we’ll see any of them replace the others in the near future.
What we’ll see is them competing in other spaces that aren’t well established yet (e.g. the Coupon space, which Google, Facebook, and Amazon have all gone after recently),
Facebook will die; just give it time. It will go the way Geocities went, etc.
For me, few things are more unprofessional then when I see some multimillion dollar well-known company end a commercial with “Follow us on Twitter” or “Friend us on Facebook”. Excuse my “French”, but that makes them sound like whiny little *****es.
The mass majority of people I’ve met have no concept of what the internet is. At our office environment, when you tell ANYONE to open ANY file, they open Microsoft Word and THEN try to do a FILE > OPEN on the file they want.
It doesn’t matter if people don’t comprehend the technology. If they can muster a way through it and find some semblance of success, they will continue to use the exact same process over and over. The worst comes from people who don’t want to learn the right process when someone offers to show them.
I don’t know about “becoming” the internet but the way they’re going they’re going to solidify themselves a freaking massive percentage of it… as time goes and and more and more people join it seems to only be getting more stronger and powerful…
Though then again… myspace was a big baller once too.
I’m not a huge fan of Facebook (I probably get on it less than once a week), but we use it at work as a marketing tool.
It’s no where near our main marketing tool, but because of our primary audience (7-17 year olds), we do get a surprising ROI, considering how little time is spend on it.
That’s true! Instead of displaying their own company name, I see “Find us at facebook.com/<insert company name>”. Still, I don’t share in the same view as yours. I believe FB is trying to set the norm in today’s culture. Much like false advertisements of clothing…where a super models would portray how normal people should look like. They are stating “If you’re not in FB, you’re a nobody”. However… I do see the fall of FB… I’m sure one day or another… they’ll get hit by BIG hacker organization and be on the front page of CNN “Hackers got hold of 100 million FB accounts”… imagine that!!!
A recent study from Social Media Examiner’s 2011 Social Media Report noted that 92% of Businesses on the internet use Facebook. That’s not an insignificant number. And to those who say listing a social media button at the end of some advertisement is unprofessional for well-known companies, I would say that you should probably get used to it. Facebook might go away, but I very much doubt social media in general will. It is primarily an advertising and engagement platform that no other tool can match at the moment.
As for Facebook taking over the internet… not likely. For those who are familiar with Facebook building mechanisms, you know that you are only allowed a certain degree of customization. This is why all Facebook pages look and perform fairly similarly, there is no freedom in design.
A website however, has no limits. Not only that, there are plenty of people who want nothing to do with Facebook.
Geoffrey, I would argue that 92% number is skewed and request a basis for the statistic Is it based on a real survey or just some fuzzy math with unrelated figures like # of facebook fan pages / # of sites indexed by google?
Transio, thanks for the feedback. I took a look at the report again (I was working on memory) and notice I’ve misrepresented it, so my apologies on that. The methodology was a survey conducted of 3300 marketers, of which 93% employ social media. Of those, 92% said they used Facebook for marketing purposes. So it’s more like 85.6% of marketers use Facebook.
With that in mind it means the survey doesn’t represent companies who don’t use exclusive marketers, so the results are skewed in that sense. However, I believe the results are fairly significant either way.
yup i think that facebook is not only to become internet but it is an fully internet at this time also and in new future it will get more successes in this area
It’s not that much easy to get into this … but in these day’s more user’s are joining Facebook, As i see that facebook is mostly used for the marketing purpose and is the good place to promote anything whatever you like. Most of the id’s are fake in the facebook created by some organization’s and fake user’s.