The new payment system, being tested in UK, charges British users up to £10 to contact celebrities, public figures or new people they meet. In short, you can pay Facebook £10 to contact anyone outside your Friend List.
Facebook has started testing its new money making idea. The new system for private messaging, has a sliding scale of fees for members based on their number of followers and how many others are paying to contact them. Thus more the number of followers a Facebook user has and more the number of Facebook users who want o contact him/her -- the more you have to pay to contact him/her. For example, a user may have to pay different amounts to message different Facebook users, Salma Hayek or Demi Moore, based on the above criteria.
Something similar LinkedIn is using for couple of years now. At LinkedIn, only pro users can send messages to people they don't know. Free linkedIn users can send messages to other LinkedIn users only when they know the email of the said user.
Facebook's proposed payments are aimed at preventing users being bombarded with “spam” messages, according to the website. Facebook has previously allowed members to send messages from their account to strangers for free. When originally started, Facebook originally put them automatically into a user’s inbox, it has recently begun storing them in a less conspicuous “other” message box, leaving the inbox just for friends and family.
In December last year, the website tested a new system of charging $1 for over-18s to send messages to strangers’ inboxes with an automatic alert, meaning they would be more likely to be read. Now Facebook has extended the trial to create a sliding scale of payments to celebrities, public figures and ordinary users outside the sender's usual network.
According to Facebook, the new system is aimed at preventing spam and will be released only after trial period. Currently Facebook is busy testing a number of price points in the UK and other countries to establish the optimal fee that signals importance.
What does this mean:
If Facebook manages to perfect this system, then it can not only curtail spam on its network; but may generate some money out of it (who knows how the sliding scale of fees works at higher followers and higher queues). What is good about this new System is that it appears more in line with Facebook's social nature than Facebook ads. --------
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