Facebook: More Programs That Don't Make Money

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