Facebook will sell users their own content back 10 years from now

Tonight I have something like meta-purchase fatigue. My train back from Brussels was canceled and I went to the news stand and bought an International Herald Tribune as a consolation prize: it cost me three Euros. It contained a very interesting article entitled "Disruptions: Privacy Fades in Facebook Era". When I finally came home, I decided to re-read this online and send it to a friend.

But aaargh. The IHT site informs me that I have hit my 20 article limit for the month.

Hey! What's this 20 article limit thing about anyway? I just laid down my 3 Euros -- why can't I see the digital copy of this article.

OK. That's a bad attitude -- that's purchase fatigue, I can overcome that. I care about the content in the IHT -- it's worth something to me so maybe it's time to get an actual subscription. A few fantasies of having a paper delivered to my door in the morning (...and having the time to read it). Really, yes, let's do it. I need to support the news -- creating good news takes money.

Alas, the website is not going to let me do that: My attempts to make an impulse buy of home delivery are met with an error message "Unknown SOA error". There's the meta-purchase fatigue. You try to do the right thing -- spend your money to get something you value -- and somehow that doesn't work either.


The purchase fatigue that faces us in the future will be caused by Facebook. My prediction: In about 10 years, Facebook will start selling us back our historical posts.

Remember those pictures from that college party? Weren't they all gone? Now for a mere $29.99 Facebook will dig them out of its archive and present them to you, labeled with the names of your friends that you have forgotten and festooned with their comments.

Maybe that is the rant of a tired blogger, but otherwise it's also a darn good long term business strategy for Facebook -- if they can somehow fight the "purchase fatigue" that will arise trying to sell people back their own stuff.

At least they should circumvent meta-purchase fatigue and get the subscription service right: when I decide to shell out the cash and sign up for a subscription to get my own past delivered back to me, it would be nice if I didn't an "Unknown SOA error".

In the meantime, I have manged to circumvent the IHT paywall and have a look at the digital version of "Disruptions: Privacy Fades in Facebook Era". Problem solved for now.

And the whole thing distracted me from actually blogging about social multimedia sharing and privacy...

....or about the fact that Google doesn't love me and doesn't return anything useful for the query "purchase fatigue". "Purchase" is a modifier and not part of my search intent in this context, Google.

I know that not interpreting my query as an intent to purchase something is less likely to lead to ad clicks -- but please, really I'm tired of paying for stuff, humor me, really...

No, Comment

Six months ago the Boston Globe ran an op-ed by someone named Douglas Bailey entitled 'Got a comment? Keep it to yourself.' The piece takes the position that comment posting functionality should be removed from online newspapers in order to restore 'journalism's dignity', lost, according to Bailey, when newspapers started making their content available online for free, thus devaluing it. Not surprisingly, this article has collected 193 comments, 191 of them within the first five days it was on line. Nearly every sentence Bailey wrote, it seems, is graced with a reader reaction. One commenter advises him to 'Keep his op-ed to himself.' A November late addition declares 'Reading the comments section is the BEST part of the article,' which sums up the view of many.

I made a stab at reading all 193 comments -- starting with the ones that received the highest reader ratings. I didn't make it through everything. Somebody (or some spam filter) must have, however, since there are notes where certain comments have been censored 'We removed archie-skip's comment.' The filterer was not, however, Bailey himself, who begins his final paragraph with, 'By the way, don’t bother posting any comments directed to me when this article appears on the Web. I won’t see them.'

What do I have in common with Douglas Bailey? Well, I won't see your comments. In fact, you can't make comments here, I have the comment functionality turned off. At times -- especially around deadlines -- I don't visit my blog for weeks at a time. For this reason, I can't spam filter and I also can't react fast enough to start a meaningful dialogue.

A lot of commenters overlooked Bailey's final sentence which read, 'If you really have something interesting to say, I’ll find you.' By turning off the comments on this blog, I am in a sense, saying the same thing.

If we believe that the Internet should be a place where opinions are expressed and exchanged, where we go to meet in circles of friends, fellow hobbyists, professional colleagues, compatriots, fellow humans, where we learn from each other, hash out the issues, forge consensus, if we want that sort of dialogue on the Internet, then Bailey's casual, 'I'll find you' represents a real challenge. Effectively, he is pushing the whole burden of supporting the dialogue onto, yes, well, right, search.

One might argue, that pieces of information get linked up in ways other than search. But type-into-search-box is the basic search gesture and our browsing, retrieval, exploring, generally amusing ourselves on the Internet behavior relies on this gesture and on the variations we bring to it. Linking things in other ways is non-trivial. Bailey's article ran ran ten days after it was published in the IHT (http://global.nytimes.com/) under the title 'Do not comment on this article' This is where I originally read it. The New York Times published two reader reactions on their site...but it is quite tricky to get from these reactions back to the original piece. You need search. I executed a couple of rounds of type-into-search-box and found it at the Boston Globe...without even thinking about it.

I guess, I am not too concerned about reliance on search to perpetuate the dialogue in this blog. The "you" reading this blog is mostly my future self, and she can comment without needing comment functionality.

But more generally, we should reflect more often on the responsibility of writers and commenters to not only express their opinions, but express them in a way that they can be found and can be associated with the larger dialogue to which they contribute. Organizing discussions around specific articles, however, might not be the answer. Surely, the issue is important enough to sustain serious debate for more than the five days that Douglas Bailey drew serious volumes of reactions...it deserves a life of its own independent from the specific article. Afterall, someone might still have something to say about it six months later.