Once upon a time, Facebook was the mother of all social networks.
Free, easy, accessible; simple. Click a button, create an online profile, and whether you are 10 or 100 you stay connected to friends and family around the world.
Once upon a time, Facebook was the mother of all social networks.
Free, easy, accessible; simple. Click a button, create an online profile, and whether you are 10 or 100 you stay connected to friends and family around the world.
Easy peasy! And of course, free! “It’s free and always will be” is Facebook’s strapline – positioning itself as a glorious social network that charges people absolutely nothing for communication on a global scale.
One of the greatest things about Facebook is that you can either share your interactions on each other’s public wall, or you can keep your conversations personal through an inbox messaging system. This messaging drew countless individuals to Facebook because of its private email nature.
Here was a system that allowed you to send personal messages to any person, in any part of the world. The inbox message was virtually a text message with no word limit and, most importantly, no prepaid charges.
You didn’t even have to be on someone’s friend list to send them a message. All you had to know was the person’s name and you could send them a message at no cost.
In April of this year all of that changed.
Facebook announced that it would be charging users a fee, (around R2.50 in South Africa), to send inbox messages to people who were not on their friend lists.
To make matters worse, the fee depends on how famous users are. If they have a high number of followers, the fee to send them an inbox message increases. It now roughly costs R6.50 to message Snoop Dogg and R2.47 to inbox the average Joe. “Pay to stalk” is what someone said about it.
So why not just make friends with someone on Facebook and then message them? Well, because sometimes Facebook is the easiest way to locate people you’d like to contact for reasons other than friendship.
Journalists, for example, use it to get hold of potential sources.
This is happening at a time when Facebook’s developers have been making numerous changes to the look and feel of Facebook and just imposing them on users.
This time they may have gone too far and it could cost them millions of users. Or members may just ‘suck it up’ like the have with all of Facebook’s changes. Time will tell.
