What Facebook is attempting to achieve here goes aggressively against the realms of common sense of any webmaster or company who owns a growing online community of any size. Their platform has always been free to use from day one.

1. Facebook Announce Feature – Dark
Days Ahead For Social Media
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2. Today is an extremely special day for me, and it may turn out to be even more
significant as time moves on. As a Co-Director to one of the country's most
successful SEO and digital marketing companies my time is tight. However, it’s my
sons 13th birthday today, the becoming of a teenager. In my late night madness,
midnight approached and I echoed the words of a proud father by posting a heart
wrenching status update wishing my son the best. Today has been very busy, and
until now I haven’t had time to even browse my facebook wall. But when I did, I
was surprised by what I saw. I navigated to my status update I had posted for my
son, and to no surprise I’ve seen a new feature (regular occurrence on FB) called
“announce” located alongside the like, comment, un-follow buttons. OK so this got
me motivated, it is my son’s birthday and I really want to announce this yeah? So I
press announce, and I receive a pop-up. It states “Announce an Important Post –
Usually Original Price $7.30 USD – Price: Free”.
Does this mark the beginning of paid features and products within the
facebook portal?
History will suggest that in most cases when a website soft launches a feature with
an intended price tag followed by free, generally means it is a sign that in some
point into the future it will require a payment.
Facebooks recent IPO failure is not news to anybody, nor is the outward frustration
from everyday investors who have lost millions from being caught in between firing
lines. This latest move appears to me that a desperate attempt to invent a viable
financial model for Facebook investors is taking place.
Why is facebook announce a failure, and why won’t it work?
Our voices and opinions that we the people offer on social streams is our value
contribution to the social media space and everyone is aware of that. Our
willingness to congregate in the billions on social media spaces worldwide has
provided an amazing data set and financial opportunity to those in the business
world.
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3. I was lucky enough in my last life to be deeply involved at a strategic level with a
really exciting, multi-million member online community. When you control a mass
of voices who are giving you insights and opinions about your community you tend
to listen.
What Facebook is attempting to achieve here goes aggressively against the realms
of common sense of any webmaster or company who owns a growing online
community of any size. Their platform has always been free to use from day one.
In time, they have gradually introduced the concept of a paid advertising model, the
introduction of companies and business owners integrating into the community with
fan pages along with “paid” developer applications. A fair amount of these
movements up until now to monetise their platform have been received with a
pessimistic approach from their following. In fact, statistics in many western nations
amongst certain demographics will suggest a decline in subscriber rates.
Is there an alternative way that Facebook can monetise their massive congregation
of people without implementing paid features to their own platforms features?
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