Feeding the "Beast": Hooked on Social Networking
By The Windchime
As online social networking continues to grow rapidly, it has become more and more popular to its ever increasing millions of addicted users. And even as it begins invading and proliferating in the mobile communications realm, its enormous increasing potential to reach and influence all sorts of consumers globally has attracted so much the advertising industry worldwide.
Because of this development the authors and creators of social networking now seem to have become not so much interested in the business of social communications. Their primary interest has shifted and is now more on the business of delivering social networking users to advertisers. In a sense, they are ingeniously trying to introduce a clever social engineering concept designed to add a reverse role into the relationship between consumers and advertisers.
Instead of just the traditional advertising method where it is the role of the advertisers to present products to the consumers, what the authors and creators of social networking are now trying to do is add a reverse role. By innovatively re-engineering their social networking services, they are able to effectively turn the information uploaded by its hundreds of millions of social networking users into a sort of a premium merchandise and packaged it in such a way that it is very attractive to advertisers. Every piece of information that users upload online becomes a part of the merchandise advertised to advertisers. People's information are now turning into a prime merchandise or product, not much anymore the services of the social networking sites. Social networking services merely now becomes their bait to catch more users' information for their gigantic pool of online consumers information database.
This is what is happening to Facebook's new design of its members' user profiles. They call it "Timeline". It is supposed to present users' information more comprehensively in a redesigned chronological sequence. But what most users don't know is the motivation and intention behind it all. It seems Facebook has also been infected by the "money virus". Users can only hope that Facebook will not deviate too much from its original motivation which made people patronize its services on the first place.
"Starve the beast, and you'll starve yourself." Think about it -- particularly the reverse of it.
Because of this development the authors and creators of social networking now seem to have become not so much interested in the business of social communications. Their primary interest has shifted and is now more on the business of delivering social networking users to advertisers. In a sense, they are ingeniously trying to introduce a clever social engineering concept designed to add a reverse role into the relationship between consumers and advertisers.
Instead of just the traditional advertising method where it is the role of the advertisers to present products to the consumers, what the authors and creators of social networking are now trying to do is add a reverse role. By innovatively re-engineering their social networking services, they are able to effectively turn the information uploaded by its hundreds of millions of social networking users into a sort of a premium merchandise and packaged it in such a way that it is very attractive to advertisers. Every piece of information that users upload online becomes a part of the merchandise advertised to advertisers. People's information are now turning into a prime merchandise or product, not much anymore the services of the social networking sites. Social networking services merely now becomes their bait to catch more users' information for their gigantic pool of online consumers information database.
This is what is happening to Facebook's new design of its members' user profiles. They call it "Timeline". It is supposed to present users' information more comprehensively in a redesigned chronological sequence. But what most users don't know is the motivation and intention behind it all. It seems Facebook has also been infected by the "money virus". Users can only hope that Facebook will not deviate too much from its original motivation which made people patronize its services on the first place.
"Starve the beast, and you'll starve yourself." Think about it -- particularly the reverse of it.
Read also: Facebook’s Timeline: A catalog of nothing
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Here are some of my observations concerning the new Facebook Timeline:
Aside from the unacceptable serious privacy issues (which is the main issue that bothered many prudent Facebook users), I also find it overwhelming to the eye the way the volume of information is presented as you scroll down the screen of the Timeline profile, especially if a particular user's account has plenty of entries to show. Instead of the viewer comprehending the entries in a chronological sequence, the viewer gets confused because of the cumbersomely crammed way entries are placed at both the left and right portions of the reversely-sorted downward timeline.
----------
Here are some of my observations concerning the new Facebook Timeline:
Aside from the unacceptable serious privacy issues (which is the main issue that bothered many prudent Facebook users), I also find it overwhelming to the eye the way the volume of information is presented as you scroll down the screen of the Timeline profile, especially if a particular user's account has plenty of entries to show. Instead of the viewer comprehending the entries in a chronological sequence, the viewer gets confused because of the cumbersomely crammed way entries are placed at both the left and right portions of the reversely-sorted downward timeline.
