Everybody has a price.
Commerce is an inevitable part of community. Humans have been going the distance to trade with each other for millennia. As we enter into an attention economy, we are becoming the salable goods.
Marketers are increasingly eager to snap up anyone with a modicum of credibility they can monetize.
I’d argue that’s what ruined Digg: Top Diggers ruled the roost because they had the time and obsession to build up networks of backscratching relationships with people who would vote up their posts. They became sought-after paid promoters. And Digg’s wisdom of the crowds went the way of the highest bidder.
Digg users fled en masse to Reddit. But guess what? It’s happening there, too.
Redditor MrStonedOne reported that after a post of his hit the social news site’s front page, a marketing firm contacted him seeking his help posting links.
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Likewise, a Boston-area marketing firm is trying to hire Wikipedia editors. Job requirement: navigating the online encyclopedia’s prickly, procedure-obsessed bureaucracy. Actual subject-matter knowledge required: none.
It turns out that paid editing isn’t forbidden on Wikipedia; it’s merely frowned upon. So, too, is knowing what you’re talking about.
The nonprofit site is in the middle of an awkwardly designed fundraising campaign highlighting the faces behind the poorly written, questionably researched compendium of what passes for knowledge these days. Perhaps we should start paying Wikipedia editors and giving the site a cut of the proceeds.
But let’s not pay Wikipedia editors to edit; let’s pay them to shut up! $20 buys you a month of silence from a petty rule-slinging malcontent. Not only will their mug stay off the site, they’ll be banned from Wikipedia’s horrifyingly Byzantine talk pages for the duration.
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Facebook’s new Timeline is an advertisement for yourself. It’s a magazine of me, me, me, complete with a glossy “cover” photo—an idea it seems to have nicked from Path, a mobile social network started by ex-Facebook employee Dave Morin. Below, it presents a digest, year by year, of your entire history on Facebook. For some early-adopter Ivy Leaguers, that stretches back almost eight years to early 2004.
Cue the privacy alarmists! Yes, in theory, obsessives can trawl (and troll, for that matter) through your entire history. But hon? Let’s be honest: You’re not that interesting.
According to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, only 35 million people update their status daily. If that sounds like a lot, remember that it’s only 7 percent of Facebook’s 500 million daily active users.
Before Facebook introduced its News Feed—that central digest of all your friends’ activity that greets you when you first logged in—people used to click, click, click through Facebook profiles. Timeline is an attempt to bring some of that back.
And the fancied-up format is designed for ego-fluffing. You can pick and choose what to highlight. Already, people tend to post their best and brightest moments, presenting an airbrushed version of their lives that tends to sadden their friends. (Unless you are British, in which case you are far more likely to present a drunker version of yourself.)
Timeline takes those prettied-up moments and assembles them into an endlessly scrolling, glossy pictorial of awesome.
Using Facebook is about to get even more depressing, in other words.
A modest proposal: If Facebook is turning into a magazine-like experience, where are the ads? And what’s in it for you? Facebook is reportedly swimming in cash. It’s time users, who create all of Facebook’s content, got some of that largesse. Why not let users sell their Timeline covers to brand sponsors in exchange for a cut of the revenues?
Liking Starbucks is so March 2010. I’m thinking product placement on a massive scale, people. How much would you charge to smile and hold a piping hot Gingerbread Latte?
Timeline is the story of your life. Next step: optioning the movie rights.
Photo by anythiene
