But what if users don't see a difference between a paid link that appears on the first page (via AdWords) and an organic one? AdWords is then effectively the same: pay for placement on page one. But of course, the payment goes to Google not some other seller.
Having policies that strive to maintain some sort of objectivity in organic rankings might be rendered moot when there are always paid links (via AdWords) appearing at the same eye level to users, a majority of whom do not know or care how they got there.
In simple terms, AdWords is paying (and only paying Google) to be on page one. How is this different?
IPO means that $1BB was the plateau. They waited for this. Time to cash out. All down hill from here. How fast? Don't know. FB CFO probably does.
FB business model is display ads plus fad factor. Recent survey said 1/2 people think FB is a fad. What happens when fad dies down? Display ads alone are not a viable business model for a growth company. Hence we say FB has no business model.
There is no reason that FB _must_ fail. But there's nothing to suggest they will succeed. That's the problem. They do not have a business model that will allow growth.
FB now has $15BB to burn through while they keep competition in check (M&A but also G+) and wait for a business model to appear (more M&A). How fast will they burn through $15BB? Meanwhile they have to deal with Wall St.
Zuckerberg is still a kid; he's an unproven CEO but has unfettered control of the company. There is no Eric Schmidt to help him.
What about morale? What if FB believers start to doubt?
And then there's that sociopath/privacy thing... and peer-to-peer.
People are thinking about what happens after FB fails. And that's smart thinking, in my opinion, even if you're not in advertising.
From a consumer perspective, and we are all consumers, FB has a ridiculous amount of personal information. Imagine what happens if it finds its way into the junk mail/direct marketing/spam industry. One big mess.
You mean the same Zynga whose stock price has dropped 50% in 60 days?
Let's assume you are right and I am wrong.
Let's assume FB is not "free" entertainment.
And in fact all those people who sign in to view/edit/upload profiles, photos, statuses and messages who do not also spend money on games and virtual goods are actually "freeloaders". Because they are using FB as if it's some kind of "free" service.
To save costs, shouldn't FB drop all the freeloaders? The ones who sign in to FB and do not spend any money. They are just wasting FB's resources. (This is a very old question that has been discussed many times.)
If FB is not "free", then why is FB letting all these users sign in and use FB's computing resources when these users never spend any money?
But here's the question I really want you to answer: Why are all these users signing in and not playing games and purchasing virtual goods? How do you explain this? Is FB some kind of "entertainment" to them? Some sort of recreation? I don't get it.
First, I don't understand how "support" is relevant. I never mentioned it.
What I'm suggesting involves no pledge from Apple to help me with any of my own software I install (BIOS, bootloader, OS, applications).
And as far as I know, there is no "support" for Apple pre-installed software anyway. You cannot call customer service and get help with software installed on Apple hardware. And as is true with 99.99% of software, it comes with no warranty. So you really get nothing from Apple in the way of "support".
As such, I would ask nothing more from Apple over what they don't provide anyway. Rather I'm asking for the the choice to buy the hardware without all the pre-installed software. Simple.
Second, I do not understand your comparisons. Automobiles and dishwashers? Do consumers usually program those? Is there a github for that sort of thing?
I'm talking about a personal computer. The kind consumers have been programming for over 30 years. iOS is built in significant part from open source code from CMU and Berkeley/FreeBSD/NetBSD that can be freely downloaded from the internet. That same code, and much more from numerous thriving open source respositories, is available to consumers, too. It is available to anyone, for any purpose. So why is Apple making it impossible for anyone to use their own software (or their own speakers) together with Apple's hardware?
Is there a legitimate reason?
No one is asking for "support". Instead they are asking for Apple to stop getting in their way and interfering with how they can use a product that belongs to them.
When you buy a Honda automobile, Honda doesn't care what you do with it afterwards. They do not act to control which car stereo speakers you can and cannot install. You bought the car. What you do with it now is your business.
Way back then, Apple hardware was considered expensive by comparison to the alternatives.
Apple is now producing products that many more people can afford.
This is what I meant when I say Apple's prices are decreasing. The cost to the consumer to own an Apple "computer"[1] has come down.
1. I consider all three: iPod, iPhone and iPad to be "computers". Deliberately crippled, to limit functionality, perhaps. But still posessing the basic elements of a computer.
I'm genuinely curious, what would you do with the data?
Please do not read this the wrong way. I am not questioning what you're doing as improper. I am just curious.
Isn't most of the data in PACER just procedural (cf. substantive)? If yes, wouldn't it have only limited value in illuminating to the public "what the law is"? Would it have some other value? Maybe it might allow generation of some interesting statistics on outcomes, etc.? Maybe you are planning to "disrupt" the jury research industry?
Pardon my ignorance.
(Personally, I think you should also support freeing up access to academic research. Public access to research publications is equally as important as access to the total corpus of US Court dockets. I'm not sure anyone could learn that much just by reading court dockets. But I can assure you that by reading the scientific literature in a given field of science, one can learn a great deal.)
I agree with you entertainment is a cash cow. But FB is _free_ entertainment. As is your photo-album and the discussions you have with your friends.
You appear to be referring to future success. It's like Microsoft talking up "vaporware". It gets people's attention, maybe it convinces some to believe and some to invest, but it offers them nothing. Only a promise of some future of which no one can be certain.
We have almost two decades of web display ads and their effects on building brands. Advertisers are not too impressed. They have waited patiently for something that compares to a magazine ad. And no one has delivered. Maybe solving the context problem might not be so easy. Maybe a website is not a magazine.
Meanwhile people are looking for products and services via the web, with their credit cards in hand. And Google has been there to help advertisers reach them.
That's not some promise of the future, that's the here and now.
Facebook has real power for influence. And some of that can no doubt benefit corporations. But what Google offers is something much more direct and efficient. And it's not a pie-in-the-sky promise, it's proven to have worked year after year.
Facebook has no business model. They only have everyone's curiousity. And that's mainly because the "content" on FB is everyone's friends and family, not the type of packaged, commercialised "entertainment" you get from a magazine. FB is not a magazine. It's a photo-album. More specifically, it's a collection of personal photo albums.
It does have some added "features" to the traditional photo album. It comes with tacky, invasively personal display ads in the margin. And it comes with a team of "engineers" looking over your shoulder to log every photo you look at and every comment you make. And it's exposed to viewing by millions of strangers (this is totally unnecessary). I think we can have photo albums without all that cruft. And I think we will.
What is the product? Is it the hardware? Or the software? Are you saying they are one product, not two?
We've been through this countless times. Microsoft and the OEM's. Apple and their locked down hardware. Consumers are not fools. They know the difference between a software company and a hardware company.
Does your packaged food come with silverware?
Do your finished songs come with an mp3 player?
Does your premade clothing come with laundry detergent?
I find these type of comparsions (e.g. of computers and software to food, music, clothing) very strange. We are talking about cheap, programmable consumer electronics. And then we are having an argument over whether the consumer should have the ability to program them. It is absurd.
It's sort of like Facebook having a "Like" button but no button to signal caution. It's a distortion of reality.
If everything we ate smelled and tasted "good", we'd die. Because we would eat poisonous things. There is a reason why some things smell or taste "bad".
As another commenter points out, it's a shame because knowing what projects did not work, and when, would be helpful.
Maybe the ecosystem just isn't big enough yet. Too much of the market is still not yet using Apple's products.
Maybe when Apple reaches Microsoft-level penetration, and of course that is their goal (Exhbit A: Apple pricing trends), you might get your druthers.
It really should not be necessary to "jailbreak" a device in the first instance. The user should be able to easily install their own choice of software on the hardware they have paid for: e.g., applications, OS, bootloader and BIOS. If you want to install Apple's software, you can. If you do not want to install their software, you can install something else. Simple.
Hungry. Get food. How much thinking is involved in that?
Do you know what has a very high clickthrough rate on FB, probably their highest CTR ever (but which is no longer allowed)?
Pop-up styled ads for "party poker".
Not much has changed since the 1990's in this regard. Web advertising is still much the same. And anyone who has been using the web since then, such as the author of the MIT article, sees and knows this.
But do the kids with advanced degrees being hired by FB at $100K/yr know it? Nope. They believe that watching your every move and analysing who your friends are is a path to riches.
I'm not sure what's worse. The knee-jerk response of web users to blinking poker ads, or the blind allegiance of otherwise intelligent young people to a sociopath who thinks destroying privacy is a "goal" worth pursuing.
News flash: Communication on and above the scale of FB is possible without destroying privacy.
OK, so if your wife says to you, e.g., "Swannie, we need [description of rarely purchased, high priced product]. The old one has stopped working." Do you check the front of the fridge, your kitchem notice board, the shoebox and then your photo album to find the contact information for who sells [product description]? Maybe you have the name of who to contact in one of those places? Or you need to call your friend to get a recommendation? Anything is possible, but what do you think is what people do _most of the time_?
FB is the next Pets.com
But it's going to be a slow, painful decline. They have raised billions to stay alive.
Solution for FB: Build a search engine and put it where the display ads are. Keep people inside the walled garden by removing any possible reason for them to leave. Like 1990's "framing" reborn. FAIL.
The whole notion of FB is utterly absurd. Tell us who all your friends are and we'll "enable" you to communicate with them (even though it's trivial to do yourself without us). We reserve the right to analyse all the information you give us and monitor everything you do on the FB site and elsewhere on the web to _try_ to make money, in various sneaky, deceptive (but really clever!) ways. FAIL.
And that's why the message to Harvard graduates[1] (purportedly America's brightest rational minds) makes deliberate reference to a man[2] who has consistently proven this to be false. The message also is centered around another pillar of rationality: the idea of "luck".
1. A link to this was recently posted here on HN.
2. One who was "lucky" enough to be awarded a Nobel Prize.
This is the trap. This is what FB employees keep telling themselves everyday. This has to work. It just makes sense.
You can keep saying the data is valuable. No one is going to question that it is. We all have imaginations. And advertisers will be curious. They will try advertising on FB.
But there's just a big difference in human behavior in the two examples I gave. They are different. Not because I can make argument based on reason for the difference. But because it's what the facts show. There is a long history to this that predates the web. You might say it's been thoroughly tested.
So, you can make all the arguments you want that people should behave a certain way, and maybe you draw on examples of your own behavior or that of others you know, but when it comes down to making money and growing like Google does, it matters more what people actually do in real life. As opposed to how we think they should behave.
Yellow pages and photo-albums are things that have been around for a very long time, long before the web. If people looking at photos (FB) are at the same time looking for products and services, then why didn't photo-albums before the web have heaps of advertising in them? The answer is because there was a different book where it was more appropriate to advertise.
Read the article on the MIT or Harvard blog again. What you are describing, especially a tactic like image analysis, is exactly the type of approach he is saying is just too invasive. This kind of approach to advertising removes anonymity and violates people's privacy when it's counterintuitive to do so, according to the article.
Sorry dude. I missed the sarcasm, obviously. I just used your statement as opportunity to rant about a recurring issue I see. I probably shouldn't have. It's certainly not directed at you.
Maybe you were joking but sadly I'm afraid the statement I quoted is actually true for a lot of people.
Can you give an example of some sample input and how you want the output to look? I'm stupid and this is the only way I can be sure I know what you're trying to do.