Facebook = boring vs. The Pirate Bay = interesting
I joined Facebook when we* all piled on a few months back. It all went beserk for a little while, achieving critical mass among my friends with the result I was checking it every day. Now I hardly check it at all. I had hopes they’d innovate in a different direction and rather than a load of useless applications what it would turn into would be a way of managing your social network; that rather than a peripheral activity easily organising your social life would become the heart of the platform. I can’t even sort my ‘friends’ by my really close friends I can actually go out with and vague ‘friends-of-friends’ friends. As it is Facebook just looks cynical and useless. Here’s a good analysis from Fake Steve Jobs:
“Facebook is a Ponzi scheme. A handful of VCs have created the illusion of an actual market by funding apps companies and then doing deals with each other — passing cash back and forth among (them) to make it look as if money is being made.”
Does anyone have a workable strategy to make money off the thing besides convincing other people that limited means of annoying loose affiliations of people with adverts has some sort of intrinsic value? I wouldn’t want to be holding a load of shares when people’s attention wanders, though that said MySpace is still talked about as though it actually has a massive cash value.
While mainstream column inches about Facebook have stretched off to the horizon the interesting stories are only touched upon. If you want to see where real interaction is at then news of The Pirate Bay hitting 12 million peers is of genuine interest. These people aren’t banging on about some imaginary value of their service; they’re getting on with the business of facilitating the free sharing of stuff people want and the people doing the sharing are not only downloading in ever greater numbers, they’re making more and more torrents available too and making sure they can be easily obtained:
“… there has been a massive increase in the number of users actually seeding files, rather than just being regular peers. In 2004, around 20% of the tracker population were seeds… in 2008, the seeders amount to an impressive 50% of total tracker peers…”
As TorrentFreak reports The Pirate Bay has stated:
“What we want you to do is to spread the word to your friends and make more people share files! Let’s break 15 million – and 20!”
The value of certain intellectual property is now effectively zero. What happens next, as this group continue their concerted attack on copyright and more people heed the call by simply downloading stuff will be interesting.
“Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy) is not an organization, at least not primarily. First and foremost, Piratbyrån is since its beginning in 2003 an ongoing conversation. We are reflection over questions regarding copying, information infrastructure and digital culture.”
On Facebook people are socialising not buying. On The Pirate Bay people are sharing not buying. Not good news if you want to turn a profit.
* I know you did too.
Update: This sketch sums up the potential problem with Facebook rather well.
