Getting out of Facebook Fatigue

We have a saying in India - "Nayi nayi Dulhan sabhi ko achi lagti he" (Everyone like the new bride). Can the same be said about Facebook now when the number of FB users in U.S has gone down for second straight months? No doubt that Facebook brought us closer to our friends , made the web world a small place to hang around but also brought the need of managing our online image and hence the need to self-censor. Plus those frequent irritating updates on your newsfeed from one or two individuals in your list making you think if you really want to know about all their activities until you want to sleep with them.

There is no doubt that facebook growth at some point of time will moderate given the fact that it depends on the internet penetration of any given country. The law of diminishing factor will start playing its part. So it should not lose sleep over the stagnating number of users but rather focus on how much average time its users are spending on Facebook, how much it can engage its users. If this user time is decreasing or stagnating , then it should certainly be wake up call as it will directly impact its advertising revenue. It is still a smaller player than Google as far as the ads revenue are concerned but certain to go through the adoption curve which perhaps would tilt the revenue share the other way.

At times, people get confused and start valuing a web company on the basis of the extent to which it engage its users.For example , Angry Bird - the game is inherently very engaging and the player gets so immersed in it that he/she gives little notice to the ads ; so it still proves to be a bad business. Now take Google, they increased the value of their Adwords by creating several non-immersive pages around google.com that makes us sitting on its sites for far more time than say when Google started. The adwords remained the same , the ads quality is more or less the same, even the way they try to get noticed is same but still we are seeing more of them with more opportunities to click on them. And then they introduced the win-win adsense and started syndicating the ads to billions and now with Android , they have captured the mobiles space. 

So here is the lesson for Facebook - Invent multitude of products and features as done by Google. But they have not done it yet. Facebook.com needs be more than a place where we can share some updates, chat a bit, tag friends, upload some photos, and do a bit of gaming - not one where we come only to refresh ourselves , sort of entertain ourselves unlike Google where we go for our needs - searching , gmailing , sharing docs et all.

Commodity Trap of Indian Telecom

You are due to be charged rental of Rs.30 for CALLERTUNE on 21-Mar-11. RC with 31 to extend validity for 31 days. To deactivate, SMS CAN CT to 144(TollFree). 

The deactivation message to 144 kept on failing and sometime later came this message from Vodafone:

Rs.30 has been deducted towards caller tune rental. 

As per the Indian Government Directive, Airtel was insisting on identification documents which one Mr.Y did submit but Airtel never updated their records. After 2 months , the number was temporarily disconnected without any prior notice. The frustrated users end up tweeting as we see in the image above.

It's no more a secret that the cost of talking in India has been tending to be zero and the Indian Telecom market is becoming more and more competitive with each day. Areas such as customer service seem to be getting left behind in the race to survive and exceed in the highly competitive environment. With MNP (Multiple Number Portability)  across the same circle in full swing now, it is yet to be seen how much of improvements it has brought into telecom service provider offerings. All players , i repeat All of them actually went into a strategy of price war rather than differentiating themselves on their offerings and services. Low price without seamless network connectivity and with service issues will never get a favor from the subscribers.

The service providers have created a sort of commodity trap for themselves. With continued reduction in prices and lowest ARPU(Average Revenue Per User) in India, they just didn't had any bandwidth to invest to the extent required on the service front. Add to it the huge payments they are making for the 3G Licences. So everyone is trying to play volume game and attain a high base of subscriber to make up for the low ARPU but it is at the same time straining their systems and services. Hence those invariable billing and network issues.

Little do they realize that it is just a matter of time when they wont be able to reduce the price further and the customer centric approach will be the winning differentiating factor thereon.