So early today, facebook was down. When this happens, all you see is a browser error message. Given the rock-start like status that Twitter has somehow created around their “fail whale” (a message generated when twitter is down – meaning you see it quite often), Mashable was inspired to write a brief post asking for submissions about Facebook “fail whale” ideas. This is my first pass at any idea – your thoughts?
Would you pay for FriendFeed subscription rankings?
There is no question that feed services like FriendFeed and twitter have become serious marketing tools for the tech elite out there. I often wonder if guys like Scoble, Arrington, and Kawasaki ever actually read the feeds or just post to them. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy seeing updates from my friends or snapshots of the latest techcrunch and mashable articles without having to check the sites, but I imagine these marketing opportunities are the main reason for the adoption to date (an assumption possibly proven by the fact that if you subscribe to someone, they subscribe right back to you – I can’t imagine Andy Kaufman or Guy Kawasaki are really that curious about what I am up to…).
So lets assume this to be true – FriendFeed is often used as a marketing tool. A recent blogger made an interesting observation – there does not appear to be any obvious method to the order in which someone’s subscriptions are displayed. One constant though is that Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington, or Fred Wilson seem to appear in almost anyones front page list. Lets be honest, who hasn’t spent a little time surfing people subscriptions. I have found plenty of new subscriptions by seeing who my existing subscriptions are subscribed to. But who ever clicks on the whole list and scrolls through them all? I usually only look at those people listed on the main page.
So assuming I am not an anomaly, these “top spots” are actually very valuable for anyone hoping to market themselves and their content. Which lead to the first question: how do you get in this “top” list? Which spurred the question at hand – will FriendFeed be able to charge for this listing spot? Just like Google charges for ranking in search results, why not here? There has definately been a lot of speculation around the monetization of FriendFeed – well this is just one more of those speculations. I am interested in your thoughts.
