Anything But Coffee

Today I get to work and like many other office workers in America, first thing I do is log into my social networking website of choice. In my case it was Facebook. Now keep in mind I am a search engine optimization specialist so social networking is part of my daily routine but that’s besides the point.

So as I’m catching up on all the early morning postings of all my friends, I start to notice how they all seem to be bitching and moaning about the same problem; how none of their Facebook aps are loading up. I guess an hour without their YoVille or Mafia Wars is just too much for them to handle.

And then I started thinking how dependent we have become on our social networks.

We use social networking sites to stay in touch with family and friends. We use them for entertainment. We use them to stay up to date with news and celebrity gossip. We use them to stay ahead of the game for new developments in technology and medicine. We have become so dependent upon social networks that we don’t know what to do when they go down or aren’t available every second of the day that we want them.

And this brings me to my next point. The majority of social networks, including the major 3, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, are all free to join. All someone needs is a valid email account and within minuets you have your new social profile up and running. Free to start your social networking addiction.

But greedy as society is; not content with all the free services that we are offered on these sites, now we expect fully functional technical support, 100% up time, zero bugs and all without any type of compensation to the people running the sites.

A Social Network is a Business

This stuff isn’t free people! It costs money to build these websites, design these flash movies and code all these cool function’s, features and games you love so much. Huge databases of images and profiles to maintain, immense amount of bandwidth to manage. You can’t expect to have all this and still not have any problems for free.

Facebook announced that they finally turned a profit in the second quarter of 2009, it only took them 5 years. Twitter has yet to show any profit on their own apart from what they make from investors.

Maybe its time people stop taking advantage of these social sites and give a little something back. The only way for a free membership based social networking site can make any money and continue to provide the services we have become accustomed to is through advertising. As this seems as the best way to go, it still has its problems.

Myspace has made all its money from advertising but at the users expense. Slow load up times with massive flash advertisements for movies, continuously bombarding people with ads for online dating sites or diet and fitness programs. Sure its easy to ignore but we should be allowed to turn those adds off if we want. Facebook uses ads to make their money as well and they have had their own problems such as letting developers use profile images of users in their ads for dating sites. But with advertising being the only source of profit, what else is there to do?

Maybe its time to start charging a small monthly fee for these sites. Considering Facebook has 300 million users, I’m sure if they carged $1.00 a month for a premium membership that would allow you special features such as turning off these ads people, well people might just go for that.

Now I’m not saying that a paid membership is the right way to go but we have to face the facts. If our favorite social sites arent able to make any money on their own, then investors wil stop giving them money and then they will be forced to sale the site off, stop fixing bugs or worse just shut it down completly.

Randy Home facebook, Myspace, Social Networking, Social Networks, twitter

With all the talk about Bank Bailouts, Credit Card Bailouts and Big Corporation Bailouts, there is one section of our country that is curiously being overlooked when it comes to desperately needing a bailout, Student Loans.

I recently came across this Facebook Group Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy and agree with it 100%, this quote pretty much sums it all up:

“There is a lot of sympathy for homeowners who were victims of predatory lending; at least a mortgagee can file bankruptcy.

Many University students were only eighteen years of age when they signed on for enormous debt from which they can never recover. Where is their protection from predatory lenders?”

In our county higher education is prized and pounded into our head from Kindergarten. We teach our children that without a college education they will have to struggle to survive and will never live a wealthy, successful or happy life.

But what they never mention, until after the fact is how much a college education actually costs and that there is no guarantee that a college degree will grant you a high paying salary to allow you to live the American dream.

Speaking from experience, I can honestly say that my college education; apart from giving me a Bachelors Degree, has also thrown me into debt, lowered my credit score, has made it impossible to establish any new credit and has made living a happy life almost impossible. Even though I have 2 jobs and literally 75% of my total monthly income goes to payback student loans, I am getting taxed on these and still giving all the earned wages back to the Government; which is basically paying them twice, all while I still have to pay my other bills and find a way to survive.

So now myself, like many other American’s must be asking why is our United States Government throwing billions of tax payer dollars at Big Corporations who are directly responsible for their own financial crisis and ripping off the citizens of our country, but no one is willing to help college graduates who are only doing what the leaders of our country have asked of them to do, get a higher education?

Student Loan Bailout

I, like many others, feel that if there was a Student Loan Bailout, then our economy would improve faster then any other bailout proposal so far.

The lending companies would get all their money back; the money that goes to paying student loans would be saved in our banks or spent back into the economy, people would be able to pay their credit card bills, car payments, mortgage payments; people would be able to have extra money to invest in the stock market, small business or housing and rather quickly our recession would be on it’s way to being turned around.

Even if you do not owe any student loans, I ask that you join Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy because this is something that we all will benefit from.

Why should the big corporation multi-millionaires who are responisble for our recession be the only ones who get assistence when the hardworking American people are the ones stuck with the bill?

Randy Home Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the economy, facebook, recession, Student loan bailout

Some years ago back in February 2004, I came across this little start up social networking site called MySpace. At first MySpace didn’t seem like much compared to its only potential rival Friendster which has been around for a while. Since I was a member of Friendster and a few other news groups and small social networking sites I figured why not join this other one and see what MySpace has to offer.

The MySpace of 2004 resembles next to nothing to the MySpace of today. You were only allowed a small handful of photos, you only had a “top 8″ for your friends and the only way you could get a fancy background, graphics or custom profile was if you actually knew how to code the HTML and CSS your self. It was fun, simple and little to no spam or phishing of any sort to worry about.

By word of mouth, MySpace started to spread on the internet. And with the help of some of its more famous members such as Tila Tequila, MySpace started to spread like a virus. It’s membership skyrocketed like no one has ever seen and support websites that taught people how to customize their profiles and even profile generators started sprouting up all across the net. Some of the better code generating sites were even able to charge for their layouts. MySpace was flourishing, people were making money and everyone was happy.

Welcome News Corporation and Fox Interactive Media

Things were going good for MySpace but unfortunately things were about to change.

Just like with every other social popular entity in the internet, MySpace started to get the attention of more traditional media companies who wanted a piece of the MySpace pie. In July 2005 News Corporation, the parent company of Fox Interactive Media purchased MySpace for a cool $580 million.

What seemed like almost over night things started to change for the popular social networking site. Storage capacity increased allowing unlimited number of photos to be uploaded, support of flash profiles, videos and music players. Profiles for famous musicians, comedians, celebrities even every day companies such as Nike, Coca Cola and Hollywood movie studios all were becoming standard on the site.

With all this popularity and media exposure it was only a matter of time before the criminal element started to make its appearance. News coverage of cyber stalking and pedophiles and political and religious hate groups appeared on the evening news at least once a week. Then came the spammers the phishers and all the fake profiles from dating and adult websites started flooding members inbox and friend requests. It got to the point where no one wanted to even log in or at most had to make they profiles private in hopes of avoiding all these scams.

Its safe to say the fun of MySpace was gone and all that was left was a corporate ideal of how a social site should be.

The Rise of Facebook and Twitter

Around the same time in 2004 another social networking site originally called thefacebook.com but now more formally just known as Facebook was started over at Harvard University. This was more or less a social site for Harvard students but eventually expanded to other college students then high school students and finally, to anyone aged 13 and over across the country.

Out of all the social sites on the internet the battle for supremisy was between Facebook and MySpace and in April 2008 Facebook took the lead. Facebook surpassed MySpace in number of unique visits a day with Twitter in a close 3rd and MySpace started to feel the crunch.

Members who were tired of all the commercialism, spam and lack of new features were being driven away in massive numbers to Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is a social micro-blogging site in its most simplest form. Members are only allowed to post 140 characters at a time so think of it as your status update on MySpace, short simple and to the point.

Now why is Twitter so important? Well lets just say this simple micro-blog has had enough influence on the net to make MySpace add a status feature which resembles Twitter and Facebook tried to buy Twitter but failed and shortly there after redesigned, to the hatred of most its users, their entire layout to have Twitter’esq features.

And lets not forget the “Evil Google Empire”, who a few weeks ago was talking down about Twitter, calling it a “poor man’s email system” conveniently just as Twitter was launching its new search feature. Sources say this is typical of Google to do when it feels a web property is a threat,;discredit the threat and then acquire the threat. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google place a bid for Twitter in the next few months.

Ok so the last section got a little off on a Twitter Tangent but it just continues to show how “simplicity of design and function” and non-commercialism is the key to a successful social network.

Facebook has luckily found this out early on with their Terms of Service mistake a few months ago where they changed their TOS to the uproar of all its users, so much that it made the nightly news and they had to change them back, to their new re-design which will also probably be reverted back to the original layout.

So the lesson for all social networking sites to learn here is that social sites need to listen to their members, and ask them what they want before changes are made. A social networks isn’t the place for commercials or a place for you to saturate with and bombard members with new movie premiers, music releases, dating services or other advertising campaigns. It’s the members that make the site a success not the corporations who buy them.

Too late for MySpace. It went from being that hip cool new club on the strip to being that 2nd class night club where all the 40 year old men hang out trying to pick up on the 21 year old girls that no one really wants to hang out at. Just not a fun scene anymore.

Randy Home, SEO facebook, Myspace, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking, twitter