webrampage

With over 500 million active users online there is no need for me to emphasize the power and potential of Facebook. But, I would like to point out that a small part of this primary source of networking isn’t being used to its full potential: the Facebook pages.

First of all, I’d like to give credit to my brother, Sajid Islam who pointed out the following in a very detailed email.

Selling Using FB Pages

I’ve noticed a growing trend where people are pushing their product sales via Facebook pages. Now that’s a brilliant idea since everyone has an account and you’ll be sure to reach a diverse network of people. A perfect opportunity to get the cash flowing in, and it’s virtually all profit since there are no costs to setup a page. Traditionally you would have to design, host and promote your own e-commerce site before you start selling the products. And all you could do is hope that you attract enough potential customers.

The Traditional Alternatives

Yes, there are other options such as Ebay and Craigslist. But, there’s far more negatives to it than the positives. It does cost money to list and sell on Ebay, but Craigslist on the other hand is a free service. However, it does come with its own set of challenges. The biggest one being the very short life-time of your ad, and reviews – potential customers aren’t able to see what people are saying about the product whereas on FB anyone can easily do that by writing a wall post.

The Benefits

I scoped around on FB and found this one particularly good example of a business using their page for the sole purpose of promoting and selling. If you take a look then you’ll notice that this business was started back in 2004 and I’m assuming they started off with almost zero start-up costs (aside from the costs of the product manufacturing).

Right now, they don’t have to worry about the hassle of hosting and all the other tiny headaches that come along with it – uptime, scalability, security and management. After all, Facebook is providing all of these for free.

The TOS Issue

Businesses like these are operating in a grey area – there are no terms and conditions of Facebook prohibiting such activities, but nor do I see them supporting people who are taking advantage of their free yet very reliable services. We’ll just have to sit back and watch how Facebook deals with them.

But, what I don’t understand is why Facebook isn’t recognizing this opportunity and acting upon it? This seems like a bright idea and I’m glad that I was the first one to point it out. Full bragging rights reserved.

Perfect Opportunity for Facebook

Well Facebook you know what? Why don’t you charge people for it? Allow business pages to be launched in exchange of a small monthly fee (flat fee or a per-product-based fee). This is the time for you to a take a page out of Ebay and do something. Tap into this opportunity before someone else does. Plus you don’t have to rely on selling ads and personal information to generate revenue.

And while you’re at it, why not launch a Facebook alternative to PayPal? Seriously it just makes a whole lot of sense. Making a few hundred millions just from the transaction fees. I could already imagine 3rd parties joining with add-ons like shopping carts and checkout systems.

Question still remains: Is Facebook smart and agile enough to recognize and capture this opportunity?

So, apparently Twitter just removed a major feature from their website. I logged in to find my lists and the number of my tweets missing. My first thought was that it was a glitch, but after further inspection it turns out that there are no more lists on twitter. I took this snapshot showing the lack of lists a little earlier:

Well let me start off by saying that this can be a step in the right direction for Twitter. The website has been getting a lot of traffic and resulting in frequent visits from the “failwhale” and the newly introduced “failrobot.” Removing the list feature might help relieve the tension on Twitter’s servers and allow a better tweeting experience for everyone.

Let’s face it: Having lists was not THAT big of a deal, as most people used them as ways to gain followers. We’ll just have to wait and see how the twitter experience will improve after this change was made. There’s just one thing: People that used lists effectively will be disappointed. Now there will be no way of tracking tweets from a specific group of people and having them in a convenient and easy to manage list. Let’s just hope that twitter will add some sort of new feature that can helps users to sort their followers and track tweets from a specific group of tweeters.

Update: Looks like the lists and number of tweets are back. That was weird. Well then again its Twitter. Stability is not something they’re big fans of.

Everyone say hi to the “FailRobot” – its the FailWhale v2. I’m sure you’ve seen this little guy every now and then, and not so much of the good ol’ FailWhale.

I’ve been getting this error every other second these days. It all started after they rolled out their little “mutual friends” list feature. Maybe Twitter’s tiny little servers can’t handle all the new extra processing. Maybe.

Maybe it wasn’t a wise decision on Twitter’s part to roll it out before making their service stable. Maybe?

Lets just hope we don’t see this guy around too often. Doesn’t look too good for Twitter.