Facebook tests new payment system to charge users for messaging

Social networking website Facebook is to begin charging British users up to £10 to contact celebrities, public figures or new people they meet.

The website is testing a new system for private messaging, with a sliding scale of fees for members based on their number of followers and how many others are paying to contact them.

The 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.

While it 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.

It has now extended the trial to create a sliding scale of payments to celebrities, public figures and ordinary users outside the sender's usual network.

Fans wishing to send messages to Olympic diver Tom Daley could be charged £10.68, while those hoping to contact author Salman Rushie could pay £10.08, according to the Sunday Times.

A spokesman for Facebook confirmed the new system was undergoing a trial period, insisting it is aimed at preventing spam.

“The system of paying to message non-friends in their inbox is designed to prevent spam while acknowledging that sometimes you might want to hear from people outside your immediate social circle,” Facebook said in a statement.

“We are testing a number of price points in the UK and other countries to establish the optimal fee that signals importance.”

-Telegraph

Google ‘to buy WhatsApp for $1bn’

Search giant Google is reportedly in negotations to buy popular messaging service WhatsApp for $1bn.

Previous rumours claimed that Facebook was also negotiating to buy the popular cross-platform mobile messaging app, emphasising that several major businesses are keen to improve how that handle instant messages. None, however, has spoken publicly about any potential deal.

WhatsApp has, according to some studies, played a direct part in declining SMS growth, and is reported to earn $100m a year. It processes up to 18billion messages per day and is currently available in 100 countries on 750 mobile networks. It is routinely among the top apps in each of those countries.

According to DigitalTrends.com, negotiations have been continuing for more than a month, with WhatsApp reportedly “playing hardball” to secure a better price.

Facebook’s $1billion purchase of photosharing service Instagram last year has bolstered the confidence of companies aiming to sell to larger Silicon Valley firms, and with BlackBerry enhancing its own popular BBM messenger, the focus has now fallen on applications that make communication easier.

Google has also reportedly been working on a new, unified messaging service to be called Babel, but Product Manager Nikhyl Singhal told GigaOM last year that the company has “done an incredibly poor job of servicing our users here”. DigitalTrends claimed that “messaging is a huge, gaping hole in Google’s mobile strategy”.

A number of messaging apps such as Line and WeChat have found rapid popularity, but WhatsApp remains one of the most popular. It charges a yearly, nominal fee to keep the service free of advertising, and also has deals with some mobile networks for international messages.

-Telegraph

Facebook to hold ‘Android event’ on 4 April. Is a smartphone on the way?

Facebook has invited journalists to the unveiling of what it calls its “new home on Android.”

This Thursday’s event will be held at the company’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters. Facebook is not providing further details. There has been speculation that the company could launch a new phone, though that’s unlikely.

Facebook is more likely to unveil a new Android app or some other integration into Android phones.

Citing unnamed sources, the tech blog TechCrunch says Facebook will launch a modified version of Android that embeds Facebook deeply into the operating system on an HTC handset.

According to the TechCrunch, report, the project could actually be called “Facebook Home”, and its hallmark would be a heavily Facebook-ified mobile phone home screen. This could include Facebook news feed stories and data splayed out right on the home screen, along with easy access to Facebook apps.

-FirstPost

No smoke. Why the fire?

The world should welcome the electronic cigarette

SOME inventions are so simple, you have to wonder why no one has come up with them before. One such is the electronic cigarette. Smoking tobacco is the most dangerous voluntary activity in the world. More than 5m people die every year of the consequences. That is one death in ten. People smoke because they value the pleasure they get from nicotine in tobacco over the long-term certainty that their health will be damaged. So it seems rational to welcome a device that separates the dangerous part of smoking (the tar, carbon monoxide and smoke released by the process of combustion) from the nicotine. And that is what an e-cigarette does. It uses electricity from a small battery to vaporise a nicotine-containing solution, so that the user can breathe it in.

E-cigarettes do not just save the lives of smokers: they bring other benefits too. Unlike cigarettes, they do not damage the health of bystanders. They do not even smell that bad, so there is no public nuisance, let alone hazard, and thus no reason to ban their use in public places. Pubs and restaurants should welcome them with open arms.

Who could object? Quite a lot of people, it seems. Instead of embracing e-cigarettes, many health lobbyists are determined to stub them out. Some claim that e-cigarettes may act as “gateways” to the real thing. Others suggest that the flavourings sometimes added to the nicotine-bearing solution make e-cigarettes especially attractive to children—a sort of nicotine equivalent of “alcopop” drinks. But these objections seem to be driven by puritanism, not by reason. Some health lobbyists are so determined to prevent people doing anything that remotely resembles smoking—a process referred to as “denormalisation”—that they refuse to endorse a product that reproduces the pleasure of smoking without the harm.No wonder the e-cigarette market is growing. Though still small compared with that for real smokes, it doubled in America last year and is likely to do so again in 2013 (see article).

In some places politicians and other busybodies are listening. Several countries (including Austria and New Zealand) restrict the sale of e-cigarettes, for example by classifying them as medical devices; others (Brazil and Singapore) ban them altogether. Some airlines, too, ban passengers from using e-cigarettes on their planes.

We don’t mind if you do

This is wrong. Those charged with improving public health should be promoting e-cigarettes, not discouraging their use. Of course, e-cigarettes should be regulated. Nicotine is an addictive drug, and should therefore be kept out of the hands of children. E-cigarettes should be sold only through licensed outlets, and to adults. It would also be a good idea to do some proper research on them. Nicotine is, after all, a poison (its real purpose is to stop insects eating tobacco plants), so there may be some residual risk to users. But nicotine poisoning is pretty low on the list of bad things that ordinary cigarettes are accused of. Some researchers reckon nicotine to be no more dangerous than caffeine, which coffee plants similarly employ as an insecticide.

The right approach is not to denormalise smoking, but to normalise e-smoking. Those who enjoy nicotine will be able to continue to use it, while everyone else will be spared both the public-health consequences of smoking and the nuisance of other people’s smoke. What’s not to like?

-TheEconomist