System which can be desribed as “You are what you buy“. They call it “Sponsored Stories“.

According to mashable.com Sponsored Stories are new ad format that turns your Facebook friends’ actions into promoted content.

“Sponsored Stories is “a way for marketers to sponsor activities that happen throughout the News Feed,” Facebook Product Marketing Lead Jim Squires told Mashable. Companies can choose to take certain user actions — such as checkins or actions within Facebook apps — and feature them in the column on the right side of the News Feed.”

“The advertiser is not controlling the message; it’s about actions,” Squires said.

Here’s an example of an action that could potentially be sponsored:

Will that idea bring them profits – yes. Will it do anything good to you and me ?

Read more about Online Adverstising Market, sociological aspects, and Facebook criticism here.

Facebook addictions – solution for the problem!

I have one suggestion for Facebook. Magic formula, fix, response to public voice, sign that they are listening.

Since most of the bad words toward Facebook is regarding how it changes and isolating people, because their excessive Facebook usage. There was no record of any changes or damages done to people, who used this online networking site as its purpose, to contact real friends with whom they lost contact. It doesn’t take 5h a day 5 days a week to catch up – does it?

Obviously people exceeding time spend on FB are those with huge number of fake friends. Simply it is not possible to have 1000 real friends and know all their names and have time to visit them, to meet for a drink, or to ask what’s new. So what I’m suggesting is to strip Facebook from its fakeness. How? Well there is away which makes money and do something good to people.

That is something I spotted when using online data sharing systems, like HotFile, FileServe, MegaDownload etc. They using simple system, it is free if you are minor-usage participant. But when you want more traffic/space/bandwidth you have to pay for it.

Why not introduce similar system on Facebook. It is quite simple to monitor pretty much everything what you do online by them. Their original system was SocialEngine. This is large PHP CMS system. It has plenty of ready-to-go solutions, where obviously they expanded it a bit. But I worked with that system several times, and it is possible to set user-session-time-out for instance. There isn’t ready to go widget to do what I am proposing, but a little bit of programming and it can be done. But I don’t think that’s the problem. Problem is if they want to do it.

You might say “it’s ridicules”, I’m not paying for Facebook. Well you don’t have to. Let’s say you one of 400 000 000 facebook users and you have 140 friends. You using it maybe 1h a day, sending emails, chatting or watching your friend’s pictures etc.  You are pretty active but average Facebook user. You will be using it exactly same way as you used to for free.

Now I would implement two limitations, one regarding number of connection, second time spend. So there you go, if you have let’s say 300 friends, and you want to have 1000, you have to pay let’s say 50$ once off. If you spend 2h a day on facebook and you want to spend 10h/day, you have to pay 50$/month, 2000 = 100$/month. Those are not huge charges. That is not the key. What that will do, it will get people wondering about their Facebook usage. Before you spending any money, you always have a though – do I really need this. And that is what I would like to see to be achieved.

Get people realize that spending too much time and effort- too much of their assets on something entirely fake. Where they should be spending it on important things in life – other person.

What do YOU think?

Thanks for reading

Zbigniew