Facebook Charges

Facebook have recently decided that a good course of action would be to charge people to message others who they aren't "friends" with.  I first saw it advertised with regards to spamming celebrities and I thought this service was exclusive to people with a certain number of friends or who we could consider to be famous, but after someone tried to message my dad and it was going to cost them 72 pence, I realised it applied to everyone.

Now on the one hand it does stop spammy messages which are annoying to everyone, but what does it encourage? From a business perspective it seems a bit of a stupid move by Facebook, if I was to send a message to someone I didn't have on Facebook, odds are I have them on LinkedIn, Google+ or Twitter and I would simply message them on one of those services, direct competitors to Facebook, or who knows even give them a phonecall.  It could also lead to an increase in friends, which sounds like a good on paper but in the world of Facebook, a lot of people would oppose this.  People who want to message you are much more likely to just add you as a friend rather than pay Facebook however much it costs to send you a message and I know a lot of people who like their friendlists and keep them neat and tidy with, you know, people they actually know. 

On the other hand of course some sort of regulation toward Facebook messaging is to be expected, with LinkedIn having certain requirements before being able to contact a person (you have to know them or have to have worked with them at some point), and Twitter having the rule of having to be followed by somebody to be able to private message them, Facebook had nothing like this, well now they do.  Also I think it is worth mentioning that if someobdy has gone through the effort of paying to be able to message you, the recipient is definitely going to read that message, making them more important and a bigger commitment than a Twitter message or LinkedIn one.

While understanding the reasoning behind the move, I feel that it could have been executed better, the idea of handing money over to message people does reinforce the idea that Facebook is it's own world that a huge proportion of the world is a part of. Maybe Facebook are so confident in their power that that doesn't matter to them and they feel they can get away with charging money for messaging people because they are in charge and people will do it regardless?  People take money more seriously than accepting a request on LinkedIn or following a person on Twitter, this to me, is one of many reasons for Facebook's popularity and power.  It is more real and people live their lives in it and now it seems that real life and Facebook life is overlapping even more, and perhaps moulding in to one.