If there was ever a bad idea put forward by Facebook management, then it was definitely the recent proposal to ban commercial activity on profile pages. People who remember Facebook’s Beacon program might well wonder why a company which first tried to completely commercialize on profile status updates now wants to totally ban such activity. But the truth is that Facebook’s Beacon failed and now, rather than letting other companies innovate in this space, they would prefer to just close down the opportunity for everyone.
To clarify, the reason why this is so important, as we mentioned in a recent blog post, is because Facebook represents the fastest growing (micro-)blogging platform on the web. The number of active traditional blogs (WordPress, Blogger etc.) is now stalled at around 15 million. Most people are just technically not proficient enough or even interested in starting a regular long-form blog. Micro-blogging on the other hand, through platforms such as Facebook, is so easy to set up that over 300 million people have now joined and most of them are active users. But Facebook is not a user-controlled and extensible platform the way a self-hosted WordPress blog is. Instead, Facebook alone decides the rules of the game and as we can see, is willing to restrict any aspect of what users can do on this platform if Facebook believes it hurts their control over the platform.
So where does all this leave the status update ? Well if the rules are adopted, you could potentially lose your account for writing something as benign as “I love this refreshing coca-cola i’m drinking right now” in your update, even if you really are drinking a refreshing coca-cola. Facebook’s idea that they can police status updates and somehow decide who is being genuine and who is advertising a product for commercial gain is simply foolish.
This topic is very important for NextWidgets because we believe that all user-generated content sites which profit from users free input of content, should also support monetisation by the users in some way. As a best-practice case we can look at the Blogger.com platform and how they always permitted users to insert anything into their blogs sidebars, such as commercial widgets or even Adsense ad units. We believe it was this willingness to respect the freedom of users on the platform which made Blogger.com such a success and ultimately led to their leading position in traditional blogging platforms.
We hope this latest arbitrary Facebook rule change does not get adopted, however if it does, it may create a unique opportunity for Twitter to distinguish itself apart from FB as the platform that truly believes in users freedom to earn a revenue from their posting of content. Twitter should immediately open up the sidebar on Twitter profile pages to HTML/widgets just like Evan Williams did back at Blogger.com.