Facebook appears to know no bounds in its quest to make money from its hapless users. The latest ‘gimmick’ is to charge ‘members’, as Facebook prefers to call anyone or anything that uses its service, is to wallop them up to US$100 to get a message to a stranger.
In promoting the service, Facebook Messages, currently limited to those resident in the USA, it was suggested you could send a message to Lord Facebook himself, Mark Zuckerberg. If you tried you would have been offered the ‘special’ service for a measly $100 to guarantee your message didn’t go into his ‘Other’ box. There was, however, no guarantee he would read it, either.
Mashable reports that the ‘Other’ inbox is Facebook’s dumping ground for all messages it guesses you won’t want to read urgently. It’s been controversial for some time, as most users are entirely unaware of its existence — and many have been known to discover messages they really wish they’d read at the time, such as job offers.
This is very clever on their part because there will probably be no shortage of people willing to pay $100 to let Mr Zuckerberg can do with his expensive messaging service and his endless stream of Facebook revenue generating methods.
At its launch FB allowed senders paying as little as one dollar to make sure an electronic message was routed to someone’s ‘Inbox’ even if the person was not in their circle of friends. Sounds like spam, doesn’t it?
“We are testing some extreme price points to see what works to filter spam,” Facebook said on Friday in response to an inquiry regarding the costly delivery fees. Pull the other leg, this ‘service’ will only add to the spam stream as advertisers cut bulk deals with FB to get to premium members.
This latest gimmick will add to the growing list of ‘Dislikes’ that Facebook keeps coming up with to alienate its base of loyal members. MySpace may not have been so bad after all!