I for the life of me can't figure out why Facebook has Twitter envy. Maybe it's the followers, or maybe it's because you can follow celebrities, who knows. One thing I am sure about is that if Facebook isn't careful they can completely screw it up. What am I talking about the Privacy Settings. Just recently Facebook in an effort to compete with twitter changed their privacy settings so that things can be more easily indexed by a search engine. Read Article.
As this an attempt to take a shot at twitter, Facebook had some sort of trend about bra colours? Was this to take a shot at twitter? Probably. Did it make sense? Not to me but I don't wear a bra so maybe it effected me less. Facebook seems to be scared of twitter and my evidence is facebook recent changes to it's privacy rules. Read Article.
Facebook shouldn't be trying to be more open (in the content sense) they should trying to keep people's information as private as possible to the point where in the EULA companies can pay for placing ads or sending email fliers or messages about products they sell, services and or events in a region reaching people living in that region. Your selling access to your users, keeping everything else free; thus not having to monetize the services via subscription. You could also monetize by taking a percentage of the virtual economy, where you can pay money for e-cards to friends, or items in games like farmville.
How about selling your farmville game to someone else or trading virtual items for real world money and taking a cut? There is so much potential for Facebook the biggest thing going for it is the 65 million active users. No online app or service to my knowledge is larger then Facebook. Facebook has so many ways it can monetize it's not even funny, if it's to partner with google to show ads in the direct messages or emails based on keywords and splitting the revenue or getting money from government to perform census and surveys. Why does Facebook want to be twitter?
