Developers are not paid to type but to solve problems.
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Algorithm
Facebook Mobile | or “Facebook’s Death”
Facebook has a problem according to the stock market. It lost almost half it’s value since the IPO. The problem is mobile.
No, the problem is not mobile. The problem is a problem that no-one found an answer to: “how to monetize mobile”.
Facebook’s biggest issue is that their business modell can’t be directly applied to mobile. And that’s a massive problem – I actually can’t remember when last I’ve used Facebook’s desktop version. I either fire up the FB iOS app or access the newsfeed through flipboard or pulse.
I’ve you compare above screenshots you know why. Let’s be realistic here, the FB app is one of the worst apps for iOS but it’s still better than the cluttered desktop version.
Facebook’s problem is not the amount of mobile traffic – and they’re making through acquisitions sure (Instagram, Glancee) that no other mobile social network can grow – but how to make money with all that traffic?
The second biggest income generator – the selling of virtual goods mostly through Zynga – simply doesn’t work on mobile. Zynga must be biting their butts now that flash is dead…
Facebook’s money making machine, advertising, doesn’t work either on mobile. The only way to get advertising mobile is to change the ‘no ads in the news feed’ philosophy. That’s kind of the case with sponsored stories but I understand Facebook’s hesitation. Mixing the news feed with paid for entries will make many users upset.
So the big question is – will Facebook solve the open question “how to monetize mobile” or will it fail?
My bold statement: mobile is going to be Facebook’s slow death. Facebook won’t exist in its form in 3 years from now. It’s either going to be a virtual ghost town or a sale candidate without an buyer. Goodbye Facebook.
doc or ppt?
Another nice support request!
Move to Africa
Interesting short article on Wired
iPad magic – or “we love Stockholm”
True: Stockholm is magic – and what the boys are doing there as well.
Corporatism
The most over-promised and under-delivered sentence in corporatism is
Rather be honest next time and say: You’re boring me, let’s move on and forget about it.
Comparison: IT Job Boards South Africa
It’s not a secret – I don’t like recruitment agencies. They can’t talk tech, they brag to peer-review all candidates while sending every single CV they get their fingers on and they’re expensive.
So I’m even happier to having successfully built a good team without using a single recruitment agency. The average candiate’s profile was rather scary but there were some pearls in-between.
Anyways, I used predominantly memejobs.com, bizcommunity.com, itjobs.mybroadband.co.za and careers24.com.
My overall impression is:
memejobs – very little response, great candidates
bizcommunity – high response, average candidates
itjobs.mybroadband – little response, good candidates
careers24 – high response, poor candidates
But here a more detailed list. The ads were live for 1 week, we were looking to fill 5 different roles, some applications were directly send as the email addresses were listed in the job description.
site | price per listing | responses | hired |
memejobs | R 342 | 8 | 2 |
bizcommunity | R 350 | 23 | 1 |
itjobs.mybroadband | R 342 | 12 | 2 |
careers24 | R 392 | 32 | 0 |
4 of the open 5 roles were developers and sys admins and I found them on memejobs and mybroadband – looks like the nerdy crowd is hanging out there.
Lesson learned: take some time, use your network and decide on the right job listing page. And you’ll learn – it’s not that difficult after all to fine good tech people in Cape Town!