Did You Know? | Facebook Isn't Free
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If you're not paying for, you're a product!
Facebook shares begin trading today, at a price that will value the company at oppressive to $100 billion, or in symbol to the 2011 GDP of Sudan. The difference together in the midst of this and adding happening comparably massive initial public offerings is that Facebook's product, or abet, is pardon. Its matter model is based on the value to advertisers of the affluent data its users meet the expense of by sharing their changing interests and association networks in definite epoch.
The "huge data" that Facebook and supplementary networks accumulate is especially necessary because of its level of detail. It goes far away and wide deeper than registration demographics: geography, age, gender, education - enabling marketers to seek you, the consumer, based almost taking place-to-the moment details in addition to your favorite music, what shoes you bought last week, or your varying political opinions.
Jaron Lanier, a virtual reality swashbuckler (widely ascribed previously inventing the term 'virtual truth'), musician, author of You Are Not A Gadget, and vocal challenger of what he sees as the widespread social accord and economic unsustainability of Web 2.0, sees a hidden cost in the "easy to use" facilities of the social web.
Just as Napster and its offspring slashed the monetary value of music, making it easier than ever for musicians to share their songs but harder than ever to make a living from them, Lanier sees the new generation of free social tools as concentrating wealth in the hands of a few programmers and their investors, rather than distributing it - through micropayments - to the users who provide the content.
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Whats the Significance?
The irony, says Lanier, is that businesses following Facebook ultimately undermine the spending capacity of their own enthusiast base. He cites the example of Walmart, which streamlined its buying and shipping processes so effectively that it put hundreds of competitors out of involve, effectively impoverishing the communities in which it operates to a degree that has tarnished its brand and limited its higher supplement. Facebooks customers dont manage to pay for the product itself, but our spending gift is what makes us and Facebook indispensable to marketers.
In our hurry to assume calculation technologies without reflecting almost their social and economic impact, Lanier argues, wecoarsely speaking valuing digitized efficiency more than human welfare. Lanier is by no means a Luddite he works at Microsoft harshly the Kinect Motion Sensor hes just avid in a proud where people profit paid for the things they make.
Figuring that hed rather save on the go considering hint to the Kinect, we asked Lanier what he would conduct yourself if motivated at gunpoint to take sophisticated than Facebook tomorrow. Mark Zuckerberg, if youon out there, I would adore to listen a response.
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