Facebook: More Programs That Don’t Make Money

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

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Social networks, especially the largest one which are Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, continue to come up with new features that may be useful to users but are unlikely to bring in any revenue.

The latest benefit for Facebook users is that they can register the user names by which they are identified on the site. For example http://facebook.com/247wallst. According to Bloomberg, The aim, Facebook says, is to make it easier to find profiles using search engines such as Google Inc (GOOG).

The face that the user names can be searched by Google, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing, or Yahoo! (YHOO) does not do anything for advertisers who still want to reach discrete groups of people sorted by either demographics or content preference. Facebook does not have a section like Yahoo! Finance or MSN Sports and collecting age and income from people who have built profiles on the website is difficult.

Social networks may add feature after feature to make their “members” happy. Until they add features that bring in marketers, that won’t make  much difference.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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