A few years ago I gave away quite an expensive TV stand and just recently, after moving house and rearranging TVs (etc., blah, blah, blah) we could have really done with it. What did I do? Well, I went out and bought a new one, of course. I’m not gonna go and take back what I gave away, that’s just not on, is it?
But if you’re Facebook, that’s exactly what you do.
What do you do when you get too big for your boots? Well, you either squeeze, rather uncomfortably, into the boots you’ve got or you get bigger boots, of course. Or, if you’re Facebook, you just reclaim some of the extra room in your boots that you’d previously shared with other people – us.
The Indian Giver!
If you wanted a piece of Britney, it will have to be a smaller peice after August 23rd.
Yes, folks. The big screen real-estate reclaim is about to happen – finally – after almost a year of speculation and wondering “when” it would happen. Late 2009 turned into early 2010 and early 2010 turned into ‘summer’ and now, at late summer, Facebook have plans to roll out the new advert-friendly version from August 23rd, apparently.
I just remembered. I gave free hosting to a few of my clients for some minor projects – perhaps I should change my mind and take it away. Or send them an invoice just ‘cos I realised I could make a few extra pennies with that bit of space. Would that be a reasonable thing to do? Tease people with a freebie and then take it back?
Well, in my book the answer is no. But we’re talking about (a) the Internet where nothing is really free and anyone who believes it is are as thick as two short planks and (b) I’m not a Harvard geek who owns (part owns? whatever…) the almighty Facebook and has not a care in the world for the end-user who made FB the behemoth it has become.
Just you wait n see boys and girls. Many of the big platforms will empty our purses soon enough with all things free becoming chargeable to some extent on the ‘tease me sell me’ deal we’ve all subscribed to. And if charging us to use the service is seen by the share-holders as too much of a risk – we’ll all have to adopt an extreme case of ad-blindness+++ or go crazy with more and more flashing boxes all over the screen – each one gagging for a slice of our pay-cheque.
Little ol’ Ning have done it – started out offering everything including the kitchen sink for free and then recently went to a paid-only model – after tens of thousands of people had been busy creating their Ning networks. It was a guaranteed truckload of cash from all those users who didn’t want to abandon their accounts.
Vimeo did it – sort of – downgrading the free version when they launched Vimeo Plus in 2008. $60 a year may not sound like much per user but multiply that by the hundreds of thousands of users and that was one heck of a pay day for Vimeo.
HootSuite is another cash-cow after going from completely free to having multiple ‘paid’ versions. How many gazillion people got hooked on HootSuite, created numerous RSS feeds only to find that if they wanted to carry on as they were it was gonna start costing $$$.
Many more platforms have used the finest demonstration of “Permission Marketing” right before our very eyes. We jump on the free this and that like flies on poop – many of knowing full well that the free lunch won’t last forever. Well, just maybe the latest steps at Facebook are an indication that the soup kitchen is drying up.
We gave Facebook the permission to take over our lives.
We jumped on FB in our pyjamas and our suits creating pages for our social life and our businesses. We all played ball but, my business brethren – now they want the ball back – well – part of it at least.
Facebook gave us a playground of some 760 pixels and waited patiently while we squeezed our favourite recliner into the space and made ourselves comfortable. With what comes across to me as “what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is – erm – mine” kind of marriage, they want the space back – leaving us with enough space for our trusty old over-stuffed arm-chair that Grandma gave us (ya don’t think she’ll want it back do you?)
Facebook know where the money is and they want it – lots of it.
I, like many, have no idea what Facebook plan to do with the reclaimed land or how many new adverts we’re going to be bombarded with, but it’s no surprise that this is happening. They won’t shoot themselves well and truly in the foot by charging us to use the mammoth social platform (yet) so the obvious best way to boost the value of the IPO (when it happens) is to create more advertising space.
No doubt many of the investors want to see their moneys worth and that means adverts – splattered all across your space and mine.
Facebook – we know your game.
Millions of pounds, schillings and pence (or dollars and cents if you prefer) down the proverbial s-bends. All those businesses around the globe that spent vast sums of money on developers designing the perfect ‘welcome to our Facebook page’ tabs and interactive content. All now up in smoke, down the drain, into the same black hole of the dot com boom… However you want to look at it, it is our loss.
I’m sure it won’t be long before the vultures are out in force offering the “resize your Facebook content” services with the scare tactics “fix it or lose it”. Well, you won’t ‘lose’ it by not fixing it. It may look a bit squew-wiff though. 760 pixels won’t fit in 520 pixels no matter how hard you try to bend it, twist it, and squeeze it.
By the way: Do you want your Facebook page redesigning? Okay that was a pathetic imitation of a developer (I mean vulture – of course).
Anyway, back to being a little bit serious; the official Facebook statement reads:
“These updates are designed to simplify navigation for users, reduce complexity for developers, and enable us to build the next generation of tools for growing your business with Facebook.”
Do you believe that? Do you believe there’s something in it for you and me? I don’t. I’m quite capable of navigating Facebook and haven’t heard anyone crying about navigating it.
Reduce complexity for developers? Which developers are them then? The ones who build games? The ones who do a marvellous job at exploiting Facebook code and trick us into clicking the ‘universal like buttons’?
“enable US to build the next generation” – ah ha – a bit of truth in that sentence perhaps. Notice the ‘US’ in that sentence. That’s not ‘us’ as in you and I, that is ‘us’ as in Facebook.
“for growing your business with Facebook”. Oh please don’t make me laugh my sides are hurting already. Oh – I get it. You want ‘us’ (now ‘us’ means you and I folks) to buy more adverts… Gotcha dude. Yep. I’m hearing you now. So you (Facebook) can make more money.
I see it this way:
When Facebook was launched we all seemed to be heading ‘wide’ screen. We were viewing the web on wider laptops and the space was plentiful enough for us to have 760 pixels and, with web-sites going a little wider to use as much of the wider screens as they could (within reason) FB had enough pixels to display as many ads as they wanted and we were all happy.
Along came the (second) smart phone boom with apps for everything, including Facebook. Facebook without ads on a small screen is a big problem for Facebook and all the investors. It sure doesn’t look good on the IPO documents that would say “sorry, but Facebook ads are only shown on desktops and laptops which will lose us umpteen billions per year in lost ad revenue”.
Along came the iPad, the Kindle and many other variations of ‘small screen’ devices and it was back to the drawing board. How can we keep doing what we’re doing but maximise ad space when many devices are dipping back down to 1024 pixels and less.
Obviously, Facebook needed to address this issue and they knew it. If they want advertising space – for real ads – something had to give and the giving was not going to be done by FB, oh no, we’re giving back what was given to us. 240 pixels each please… Hand ‘em over or else!
Facebook wants the pixels back. End of.
By the way. All the above is purely speculation, of course. Facebook may, in fact, be reclaiming the 240 pixels in order to have a uniform page layout across all tabs (at the moment the custom tab is 240 pixels wider than all other tab content (the Wall, for example). But what do I know? Nowt. I am completely guessing at why FB are taking back the 240 pixels and I could be proved completely wrong.
Let me also clear up the issue about advertising. If the real intentions of Facebook (or any platform for that matter) is to use space for advertising I have no issue with that whatsoever. Advertising pays bills and helps to keep a lot of great apps and features free. What gets my heckles up is when we, the users, are given something as part of the ‘deal’ (the deal being that our use of such a platform helps promote it to other users and boosts its overall value to investors) and then have part of what we were given taken away.
But, whether I’m miles off the mark or whether there’s any new ads do, in fact, appear all over our Facebook profiles and pages – I enjoyed writing my take on it, and hope you enjoyed reading it.
What do you think?
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