Facebook turned 10 in February, and like any 10-year-old, it's
changing, complete with
growing pains and headaches.
With 1.28 billion users of the world's most popular social medium,
Facebook is trying to keep users, attract more users, make money, and please
advertisers, all at the same time. But those goals - have you noticed? -
conflict.
The Facebook F8 conference Wednesday in San Francisco highlighted
the delights and challenges to come. Cofounder Mark Zuckerberg - who,
amazingly, turns 30 on May 14 - spoke of "a culture of loving the people
we serve." But is that users or advertisers? Or both?
The main conflict in point: Facebook is trying to improve your
sense of privacy while helping advertisers track and target
you, based on information you give to Facebook. So you can be more private -
even as your personal info is used to sell you stuff.
Privacy: Up to now, if you're intrigued by a
Facebook-based app
named, say, Angry Flowers or Hilarious Cat Farm, when you
register, you must let the app get at all the info you gave when
you first
registered with Facebook. But Wednesday, Facebook
announced Anonymous Log-in,
which lets you try apps without
telling who you are or sharing your info. The
Facebook log-in
itself will change, too, to give you sort of a line-item veto
on
the info automatically shared with apps.
Privacy control! Could this be a response to the unease over
privacy - this from the guy who told us in 2010 that privacy was no longer a
"social norm"?
But user privacy is, and ever will be, in tension with the
need to monetize. User info is what Facebook has to sell - and there's money in
making it mobile. People with handhelds are on the go, clicking their apps,
those little bookmarks and enablers, weaving webs of their own. They leave a
trail of choices and locations that's catnip for app-makers and advertisers.
Apps are the axons in the great nervous system of the mobile Web, and
Facebook's going that way, too, especially in the last two years. It's money.
For a while now, Zuckerberg has been calling Facebook
"the big blue app" - a bundle of apps, really. He wants to spin off
some - but even more, he wants other apps to come live on or connect to
Facebook. Last year, people logged into apps and websites using their Facebook
log-in creds more than 10 billion times. In April 2013, Facebook bought the
app-making tool kit Parse, and since then, 260,000 apps have been built with
it. Facebook wants to help people make apps, and money: Zuckerberg said,
"We're going to help you monetize in a serious way on mobile."
Fully 59 percent of Facebook's revenue is from mobile
advertising. Facebook claims 1.01 billion monthly active mobile users. At F8,
it boasted that it had "one million advertisers," and that its
payments system has processed $3 billion in transactions for app developers,
with 100 of them making $1 million-plus a year via Facebook.
Ads: Also unveiled Wednesday was
Facebook Audience Network (FAN). Until now, advertisers on Facebook had access
to all Facebook's info about you, your background, every "like,"
every click, every friend and un-, every site you signed into via Facebook
log-ins. And they could use that to target ads to you - but only on Facebook.
FAN, though, is a network of apps that extends outside Facebook itself.
App-makers, if they join FAN, can use Facebook info to track user preferences
and target ads (outside Facebook) to them, on other apps, other sites. If FAN
is widely adopted, it could extend Facebook throughout the Web.
Nefarious? Creepy? Depends on how you feel about e-commerce.
Every move you make, every breath you take, somebot someplace is watching you.
Were I so inclined, I could be anywhere from irritated to torqued off at bots
tracking me to sell me stuff.
But it's here, it isn't going away, and Facebook says it
works. In its first-quarter earnings report, it said it made $2.27 billion in
ad revenue. Wall Street seems to agree: Since Facebook went public in May 2012,
one share of the company has gone from $38 to about $60. Ad revenues for 2013
were $6.99 billion.
You'll have somewhat more control over your info - but far
from total. It'll still be used - and now, used much more, much more widely -
to sell you, sell you, sell you.
Facebook walks a similar cliff-edge in other ways. Its old
motto, largely a relic now, is: "It's free and always will be." Yes,
if you want to sign up for Facebook, there's no charge. And you can start
friending, unfriending, liking, and so on, and it doesn't cost a cent.
But it's undeniable: As it leaves childhood, Facebook,
moving to monetize, has sliced and diced your reach, the size of your audience,
the number of people who see your posts. You, and advertisers, must pay to
reach more eyeballs. Space and reach, once free, never will be again.
There have been complaints - and perhaps would be more, but
it's hard to complain when you don't understand what's going on. And a lot of
people don't.
The question is: How long can "the big blue app"
balance pleasing users and pleasing advertisers? Is there a peril-point at
which one wrong bot-move could blow up the joint? If you love "the people
we serve" too much, will the other people you serve scram?
Welcome, Facebook, to your next 10 years.
Source:
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