The other day I was discussing Facebook w/ my wife and she was explaining how much she liked the service especially since our move up north away from friends and family.
I had also been dealing w/ Facebook on a different level w/ attempting to use there Ad system for YoParts. It was less than effective to say the least.. then I mentioned to my wife that Facebook should leverage the power of their users and basically rev. share w/ users and auction off user's profile pages etc. The basic premise is lets say for instance Robert Scoble being a star user would sell advertising space or to be branded and share the revenue w/ facebook.
As the economy gets worse more and more peeps are spending time online and especially facebook.. This caused quite the discussion on Techmeme today and what FB should do about it.. It has been well documented that FB has had a really tough time gaining traction in the ad space and is even getting the beat down by Myspace. Also social network ad spending is trending lower only elevating my point in a diff angle that needs to be approached by FB.
Facebook has already made small moves in order to get more influence via the search engines by making some internal structural changes to profile pages. I think a well thought out brand building approach similar to beacon but not as remotely scary is the tactic that should be thought about. This would encourage users to spend more time on FB to achieve a better "Quality Score" of some sorts. I am sure the algorithm could include tons of metrics FB already has. As a user I would have no problem branding my profile page or co-promoting if I was part of the team..
Anyways.. I know this one is a little far fetched but.. I thought I should share..
