What is Facebook management thinking? Is Zuckerberg off his rocker? Today, I received an email update from Facebook alerting me to my "friends' marketplace for Darien, CT". Being a curious soul, I clicked on it and saw ugly paintings of naked women, real estate for sale in Florida and other things I really didn't care about or want to waste time looking at. These items were being sold by "friends of my friends." It made me wonder about my friends' friends.
Even worse, the whole thing really turned me off. It left a sour taste in my mouth. What is Facebook trying to do, besides make money? This is not as clean or elegant as Craigslist or Ebay. I don't want these things. I'm not looking for them. This feels like an invasion of privacy and cheesy waste of time. If I'm in the market for such items, sold by friends or not, I will search for them. Facebook keeps messing around with its model. This needs to stop.
Companies that are successful are successful because they are coming from a vision of what they believe in. They have to understand why they are doing what they are doing. Companies that just set out to make money for money's sake are doomed to fail. That's what caused the financial meltdown and also the dot-com bust. Investment banks are supposed to help the flow of capital from people who have it to growing companies that need it. But instead, they're focusing on making money by selling new securities that they've made up out of thin air or junk. We've all seen the unfortunate result.
Facebook started out as a great, simple idea, filling a real need for people to connect with one another. But its mission to make money has taken place without soul or vision. I watched a great video yesterday on TED about what makes people into real, successful leaders. It's worth watching. Mark Zuckerberg needs to watch it, too. Then, maybe he'll do the right things with Facebook.
http://ht.ly/29iow
Starting at midnight Eastern time on Saturday, Facebook's more than 200 million users will be able to personalize the URLs for their profiles, the company announced Tuesday. By rolling out so-called vanity URLs, the company aims to make it easier to find people and brands on Facebook via search engines, while potentially boosting its own traffic as well.
Until now, a user's URL has just been a randomly assigned string of numbers.
The new usernames for profiles and Facebook Pages will be offered on a first-come, first-serve basis.
"Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google, for example, which will make it much easier for people to find friends with common names," according to a post on the Facebook blog by Blaise DiPersia.
The move is expected to set off a land rush among individuals and businesses for the most desirable URLs. Already, hundreds of vanity URLs have been doled out to celebrities and other prominent people on Facebook such as President Obama (http://www.facebook.com/ barackobama), according to the Inside Facebook blog. Now marketers can also capitalize on the new URLs to drive traffic to their Facebook brand pages.
But the company warns about choosing usernames carefully: "Once it's been selected, you won't be able to change or transfer it. If you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today at 3 p.m. EDT, you may not be able to sign up for a username immediately because of steps we've taken to prevent abuse or "squatting" on names. And only Pages with more than 1,000 fans before May 31 will be able to choose a vanity name.
According to Inside Facebook, the company is also barring brand pages from choosing generic vanity URLs such as "pizza" or "flowers" and allowing rights holders to prevent their trademarks from being registered as usernames.
To that end, it has created a form to request Facebook block use of a trademark in a URL. Not allowing users to change or transfer URLs is designed to thwart a black market from developing around usernames.