Coming Down to Money
Facebook has made a lot of international attention lately because of the highly
controversial Facebook privacy settings and changes that are going down as some
of the mostly fluidly and progressively permissive policies in the entire social
media world. What’s incredible is that Facebook started out as a massively tight
and secure way for college students to interact, now the site is coming down to
money and selling out to advertisers. In fact, a lot of Facebook players are
about to lose their favourite Facebook application, an online casino poker
free-play app – and all because of a money debate.
Facebook requires that all applications that run through the site only use a
monetary unit of “Facebook Credits” as the primary form of payment. Then,
Facebook is able to take 30 percent of the profit before paying out to the
application developers. This policy has remained mostly uncontested until Zynga,
a gaming application developer out of San Francisco, refused to adhere to this
system. Now the two companies are in an intense battle to the point that
Facebook players may lose their favourite online casino poker app because
Facebook refuses to adjust payout processes to a more fair percentage of
profits.
The entire situation just really points out so much more than the issue with the
online casino games, or even the privacy policy concerns. It’s that Facebook has
sold out and is now operating like the mega-corporation that it is. Facebook is
no longer a small start-up run by a smart college student who made all of the
company decisions – now it has profit targets to reach and has less shown a lot
less concern for the actually Facebook user experience over the last several
years. |