Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Why Facebook cannot be productive like Google

I guess everybody on the web knows the new kid on the blog, Mark Zuckerberg and his facebook thingy. Its cool and I personally think its the best design I saw on the web in 2007. It is said that "when you build a good thing the money will follow", but its not the case with facebook.
The case of Google.com the giant, they did a cool thing (better search results) and the money followed but with Facebook( which can only be the next yahoo and not google), men I dont think it can be the same cycle.
why?:
When I visit www.google.com, I go to search for web pages. While am looking for web pages, if Google shows me related ones I will still be interested in them, because they are related to what I am looking for. But on facebook, I go there to meet people and share pictures and stuff with them, if there was a way to show me how to share the stuff in a better manner and put a price on it, then I will pay, but if you put adverts ( links: remember I am not on facebook for links like on google), I wont care about the adverts because they are not helping me in sharing of stuff and comments.
so facebook could make money if people could pay to advertise their profiles, so that when you visit a friends page, they could show related (paid) pages by his and say "this is another guy check him out". But I dont think any person will do that, why will I pay to advertise my profile anyway? So they will end up like yahoo with no real cash source... lets see in the next years.
All in all Facebook can only get to the level of yahoo, no real value is attached to the activities on facebook that Facebook Inc can sell.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I totally agree.
Creating something of value is really hard.
Traffic does not necessarily translate into returns.

Mambe Nanje said...

Fee
welcome to my world, and thanks for the agreement.
catch you