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Fun New Facebook Feature: Pay $2 To Get Your Friends' Attention

This article is more than 10 years old.

Facebook has come up with a way to commoditize that terrible feeling of being ignored by your friends. The social network is testing out a new service, reports Stuff, that would allow Facebook users to pay to have their status updates, photos, or links featured in their friends' feeds, so that they appear higher and stick around longer. For just $2, you could make sure everyone really does know about your annoying airline experience or the weird guy you spotted on the subway this morning!

Unfortunately, this feature is not generally available at the moment. It's being tested among Facebook's New Zealand users, a "market where Facebook seems to test features it doesn’t want too many people to know about," notes TechCrunch.

The general reaction among my colleagues at Forbes was how "sad" a feature like this is: a paid act of desperation to get yourself heard among the noise on Facebook, ensuring that your photos and daily reports aren't being "hidden" from your friends (even if it's by their choice). While it could prove an additional source of revenue for Facebook (which investors will surely be interested in going into the IPO), a future where we have to pay cash for our friends' attention is fairly dystopic.

The feature is perhaps more appealing in the context of users who have enabled the "subscribers" feature. While I have just over 1,000 friends, I currently have over 100,000 subscribers. (Unfortunately, it seems to me that many of them are spam accounts.) But Facebook users with high numbers of subscribers and content to promote -- such as a journalist (seeking readers for an article) or a musician (seeking listeners for a new track) or a business exec (wishing to draw attention to a new product) -- might be willing to jump on a feature like this.

Money can't buy you love, but it might help you get more 'likes.'