This article is timely because in many ways, I see Facebook’s ‘Like’ system in the same light. Much of the social web is built on this very idea: people participating in services that do not provide returns to them, while providing profits of millions and millions to the companies that run them.
What exactly is the point of Foursquare? And why are you ‘Liking’ things? Will anyone notice that tiny drop of information that you deposited in the huge never-ending social-web stream? And even if someone does notice, will anything useful come out of it? Maybe a comment from one of your hundreds of friends will say that they like it too?
It’s likely that I’m being embarrasingly short-sighted and simply cannot see the glorious future and endless potential of OpenGraph and a social-enabled web, but people will now be leaving huge wakes of information behind them as they surf the web that Facebook and Zynga will make millions from, and I have the hardest time seeing what the benefit of all this will be for the user.
