Is Facebook really going to make you pay to use it?

This is an urban legend. Here is the refutation from Snopes.

I got an email from Bill Gates in 1996. He told me that if I forwarded that email to 20 of my friends, he would give anyone that forwarded it $1000. I enver got the money, but I am still waiting on it. After all, he is a man of his word.

If you want to give me $500 I will give you the full $1000 when Bill Gates pays me. :)

While we are discussing Facebook….who owns it now again? I know it was acquired some time ago….

Everyone I know is on it, but I read their ToA and strongly disagreed with something in it – maybe it was that they own everything you put up there and can use it even after you terminate your account… I forget.

This pops up all the time on Facebook, but when it really happens (if it happens) you’ll have a lot more sources than a Facebook group wall.

@marinelife thank you. Now I’m relieved.

No, they’re not.

They would lose too much of their userbase. As of last year, the stock values are high, but the company’s just breaking even.
Most likely, they’ll try to bring in more advertisers. Probably like what Google is doing to YouTube.

so they want your money and your soul.

If Facebook does start to charge it will be a “freemium” model, where basic services are free but there are charges for certain premium services. What those premium services would be is anybody’s guess.

@Snarp
Well, Farmville has a userbase in the tens of millions…

@Nullo Facebook already makes money from Farmville without charging for it directly, simply through ad revenue and deals with the developers for money people spend to get things in the game. Unless you are saying it is already a sort of premium service, I don’t see that as the premium service model, I think those games are monetized plenty already.

@lilikoi hmmm you got me thinking about this…. ownership etc…. what does this mean then? >

“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

…and I see that Tumblr also have the same kind of ToA and yet both say that “You own and control what you share on…..[Facebook…Tumblr]” yikes…. what does this mean??? Shall I write a seperate question for this I wonder…

No

@Snarp
You may have a point.

@lynneblundell I think it just means that while your account is active they can use all the stuff you put up there for certain purposes. This is pretty typical I think of sites, and isn’t that bad. Maybe I misread it before? It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at Facebook. Maybe they changed it?

Ahh, they did. Probably if you google Facebook terms of use controversy other stories will come up.

Well, it’s good to know they did away with that bad policy! But still unsettling that they had the audacity to try it.

thank you…phew!

As popular as Facebook might be, it still isn’t so great of a site that paying a fee to use it would be worth the money spent.

@lynneblundell, @lilikoi A lot of those terms of use and ownership rights are put there just as a cya. Facebook isn’t so much interested in owning your content, but they are putting it on a public website with your approval, and somebody in legal decided these terms were necessary to protect them from lawsuits. Sometimes the guys in legal go a little overboard and somebody has to reign them in.

That group just posts music videos of Pink Floyd. If they were legitimate, they wouldn’t do that. Besides, even if Facebook did start making you pay, someone would just make a new uber popular social networking site.

I bleave we wont have to.. Well probley if yew didnt put yur credit card number er yur address er fone numberr.. I didnt! Soo i hope not! Good luckk(;