If you haven't heard of Facebook, it may be time to crawl out from under that rock, dust off your 1993 Toshiba laptop and log in. In the past year, Facebook has reached an ultimate high - from it's Academy Award nominated "loosely based" film, to it's over 500 million active users - it has creamed it's competition and forced it's name into everyone's mouths. A place to showcase your vacation photos, check up on that ex-girlfriend or boyfriend, create "groups" that can organize thousands of demonstrators and overthrow governments or get funding to build statues in Detroit, play games, post your innermost thoughts, and yet you wonder... what else can Facebook do?
Good thing you asked! Introducing Facebook's newest venture...Video Rental Company! Er... ?? That's right, according to an article on businessinsider.com Facebook's movie rental experiment may be the future of media. As an "experiment" Facebook will be offering digital rentals of Batman: The Dark Knight through the site. Users can buy the rental with Facebook Credits, and Facebook takes a cut. This puts Facebook in direct competition with Hulu, Netflix, and other companies looking for a piece of the digital media pie.
The overall business strategy of Facebook is to have as much activity go through its social graph so it can take a tax on that activity, and give the businesses something back in return. For example: if games on Facebook go viral, Facebook takes a 30% cut of the virtual credits plus the millions in advertising for games.
So now it's your turn. I'd love to hear what you think about the Facebook Domination. With as many users as Facebook has, will it ultimately turn into a digital media GIANT that will gobble up the "lowly" competition? Have you seen the Blockbuster stores going out of business? Where do you think Facebook will "experiment" next?
2 comments:
I think this is rediculous. Facebook is taking too much on and they still have a lot of holes they need to fix. Before they try to take over the video world they should fix all of the holes already in facebook. I think facebook isn't reliable enough to rent videos. Profiles are still getting hacked i wouldn't want to give them my credit card info. But i do think facebook will eventually take over the internet. Soon enough facebook will be your one stop for everything on the internet.
For too many people Facebook is becoming an addiction. We log in at school, at home, at work and anywhere else where there is internet. There are Facebook applications for phones, game systems and Ipods I can only imagine whats next. I think that they might be taking too big of a leap. The video is alot more than just logging on and updating your current status. People make fake profiles and its not kept under too strict of control. I think that Facebook should be a little more informed about whats going on between profiles before they try doing something like that. I know that there have been rumors about Facebook shutting down. With people hearing all these different rumors all the time why would anyone want to trust their money with the site?
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