It’s quite amazing what companies to do get people onto their sites now, but I have just discovered another social networking site that offers FREE SMS, even mass SMS with no advertisements or anything! Facebook are apparently blocking out their links, and not allowing people to post them, so they could be onto something, and maybe even expect the other ‘big ones’ like Myspace, Facebook and Bebo to be offering similar services if they want to compete.
Read more below: Taken from. nthambazale
I recently stumbled on Wadja,a social networking site that allows its members to send free SMS messages across the world. Just like I usually do when I find good sites, I wanted to share the link with my friends on Facebook. But to my surprise, Facebook could not accept the wadja link. This was actually the very first time for me to experience this. Whenever, I try to preview the wadja link on Facebook, the following message pops up:
Warning: This Message Contains Blocked Content
Some content in this message has been reported as abusive by Facebook users.I am very surprised with this message because I do not find any kind of abusiveness on the wadja site. I am somehow thinking that it could be a deliberate ploy by Facebook to frustrate Wadja. What do you think?
#1 by PS3 - January 7th, 2009 at 23:41
I came across this somewhere else. I really can’t see Wadja been a challenge to Facebook to be honest. I mean why would I join them when all my friends are on facebook?
#2 by Mike - January 8th, 2009 at 13:08
@PS3. True, but what happens when the Facebook fad dies down (it will eventually, this is certain as Geocities, Friendster and MySpace before them), and then your friends leave it or stop using it altogether. A lot of my friends have already grown tired of Facebook and its spammy service. Then how will you use Facebook? The service is 100% useless without your friends on it, its a deck of cards bro.
Wadja can be used with or without having friends or contacts on it (as can Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Zoho etc…), because they have a true services that gives you some real value or cost savings.
Just a thought
#3 by Oliver - January 8th, 2009 at 13:20
Very true actually Mike, with services like what Wadja are providing, I don’t think they stand a chance!
#4 by Criação de Sites - January 8th, 2009 at 17:10
Nice new!
#5 by Milo@Free XBox 360 Elite - January 8th, 2009 at 19:44
@Mike
something tells me FaceBook won’t die down
they recently hit 150m users, whereas a few weeks ago it was 140m
people are still signing up, and show no sign of stopping
#6 by Mike - January 8th, 2009 at 22:44
@Milo. 150 million users according to who, facebook??? Search Hillary Clinton, Grace Kelly, Bill Clinton and see hundreds of fake accounts, no different than MySpace really with fake sign ups…hell I got 3 fake accounts on facebook, one as Bono
.
Number of users means nothing. Facebook is a money loser, has been from the start continues to be 5+ years later… so scale at this points hurts more than it helps. Actually Facebook had better revenue in 2007 with less users than it does in 2008 (and this is with a massive, astronomical 500 million USD already invested in the service and almost burned to date).
They have no business model and more importantly offer no unique service like Google’s killer search engine, and this is the main point, people directories are no go businesses and in its essence this is what facebook is a people directory. So more growth for facebook is actually a bad thing at this point especially with a down economy and ad market.
So taking a step back and putting your business cap on, you realize that facebook is not a stand alone business (better served as part of something like MS windows cloud service) but a component to a corporation that does not need to worry about monetization.
Lastly, we all know something new, trendy, and cooler will come along and all your friends will jump into that. Its the nature of the web, especially the social web, that offers no real business utility for scalable revenue to user growth.
#7 by Jake@Free Gadgets - January 9th, 2009 at 20:12
@ Mike
I understand what you mean but I don’t see it dying down just yet its just too massive, i mean even after you take away those fake accounts thiers still millions of people there
#8 by PS3 - February 10th, 2009 at 21:38
@Mike – too true. When you put it like that!
#9 by Clement - February 19th, 2009 at 06:18
@Mike, I totally agree with you. Facebook is fearing a mass migration of its users to Wadja. But they cannot prevent that by blocking the keyword wadja on their site. There are millions and millions of web sites which are spreading wadja’s service.
On a different note, how does Facebook keep track of its users. Does Facebook send out messages to ensure that every sign-up is active? What if a user dies? Does Facebook have mechanisms in place to track such things and accordingly update their info. My College room mate died last year. His profile is still up there on Facebook.
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