TechCrunch is asking Could Facebook Become The Next Microsoft?. This echoes the thoughts of myself and others from a month ago.
But since then I’ve been wondering: Where are the Facebook stars?
Only your direct friends and members of your “networks” can see the content you create. Only these people can pay attention to what you do in Facebook.
As a result:
- There are no bands giving out their Facebook URLs like they do for MySpace.
- There are no products in Facebook that you can “befriend”.
- There are no movie stars in Facebook that you can follow.
- There are no popular bloggers in Facebook that everyone reads.
- There are no stars in Facebook.
Even though I would like to open my profile to visible by anyone, this is simply not possible. Here are the three settings available for my profile:
There is no way to get rich in Facebook’s attention economy.
One datapoint: My friend Fabian in Germany says that he’s tried Facebook but gets quickly bored because he can’t see any profiles. The German Facebook clone Studivz.com defaults all profiles to being publicly viewable. (They also have a built-in MyBlogLog-esque feature where you can see who has been viewing your profile.)
Bottom line: Attention is the new wealth, but in Facebook everyone has a glass ceiling.
Related:
With the ability to profit off of attention you increase the motivation to spam. Myspace had the problem of becoming irrelevant (and it is becoming irrelevant), because of the amount of noise compared to amount of stuff I wanted to see.
Internet A-listers complain about friend request spam and application noise, but as a normal user this is not a problem for me at all. App noise has been all but eliminated and travels much better channels now and I get no friend spam because the system isn’t wide open and I’m not of some great possible value to bands or porn sites.
I don’t want it to be fully closed, but semi-closed is good. I like (for the most part) where it is now and in what directions it’s moving. The web is open, my blog is open, email is (kind of) open. Facebook doesn’t need to be open.
However an “introduce” feature where you can introduce 2 friends and a LinkedIn style Answers app would both be really cool.