Facebook Testing $100 Fee To Mail Mark Zuckerberg 228
iComp writes with a story about how it will cost you $100 to message Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook. "Got something you'd like to say to Mark Zuckerberg? The Facebook CEO still maintains a profile on the social networking site he founded, but beginning on Friday, sending him a personal message could cost you. Mashable was the first to notice that some users who weren't otherwise on the Behoodied One's Friends list were being asked to pony up before they could send a message to his Inbox, to the tune of $100 a pop. As El Reg reported in December, Facebook has been conducting a limited test of a feature that requires users to pay a fee to send messages to people with whom they have no direct connection. The idea is that the type of users who like to send spam, hate speech, and otherwise frivolous messages typically aren't willing to pay for the privilege. Impose a fee – however small – and they probably won't bother."
Laugh (Score:5, Funny)
I'll pay $1000 to slap him silly.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Laugh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Laugh (Score:5, Interesting)
I deleted my account in 2008, which I only held for about a week. Following the correct procedure at the time, it wasn't easy to deactivate and delete then, but I did manage it.
A friend recently informed me my account is appearing on his profile again.
Re:Laugh (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook is known to not delete anything. In Europe people have been requesting all the info Facebook has about them - and also found many comments they thought they deleted to still be present.
What Facebook calls "delete" merely means "hide".
Re:Laugh (Score:4, Insightful)
They think 'delete' means "Don't show this to me anymore"
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You wouldn't go to the toilet in his hoodie.
Re:Laugh (Score:5, Funny)
This sounds like a great way to make sure only the real lunatics email him. Filter out all the people with only a low/medium hatred.
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I thought you could e-mail anyone to their [nickname]@facebook.com
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Re:Laugh (Score:5, Funny)
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I thought that was called turkey slapping.
Though in your case, it may be quail slapping.
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If your member resembles a fish, I'd recommend you visit a doctor as soon as possible.
It's one thing for him to sell access (Score:5, Interesting)
It's his company, so any money made benefits him, but when they start selling access to other people without them making anything, it just doesn't work. Now, perhaps if they allowed people to sign up for this service, and do something like Apple where there's a 70/30 split, then maybe you have a recipe for success.
Great business policy (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Great business policy (Score:5, Informative)
"most used" and "best" are not necessarily the same thing.
Re:Great business policy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, it's "crappy". With over 1 billion active users every month.
What is it with neckbeards and their total inability to figure out the difference between "crappy" and "best social site ever made"?
here's a for instance. I was on facebook the other day because my Mom died. I wanted to send a message to my close friends, but it's been a long time since I was on facebook so I wanted to scan thru my friendslist and updates my "lists" so I could be sure I wasn't leaving people out or including people. It's like a bloody nightmare to edit your lists on Facebook. Took me 30 minutes to figure out how by accident because nothing is where you'd think it should be and when I DID find it there's no way to see yo
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Those two are not mutually exclusive.
It just means that the rest is even worse. At least Facebook has something that's essential for a social network: users, and heaps of it.
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And I suppose you think McDonald's is gourmet too, right?
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Thats how Linkedin works.
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I do think it works for other people.
I want people to be able to reach me. But I only want people who have a legitimate reason to reach me. Spammers don't qualify. My fianceé's ex-husband doesn't qualify. But neither of them would pay money to reach me. Who would? I don't know. A fan of my work. A long lost relative. A lawyer wanting my testimony. If I knew, it wouldn't matter. They'd be my Facebook friend. By charging for the service, Facebook can open up my message box to the public and make money wh
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Yeah. It can be a big success and Facebook could get even more information and money from it. As I mentioned in a post last year on a similar topic: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3332885&cid=42362747 [slashdot.org]
It could create a popular alternative way to support artists, coders, etc.
For example artists/coders/creators can sign up formally with Facebook (so that they can get paid more easily) and Facebook takes a 30% cut (like Apple does for their stuff). Then the hordes of fans can easily send them mone
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It is if he's the majority shareholder. I've no clue if he is, frankly I don't much care.
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He is indeed the majority voting stock shareholder.
Everyone who bought in knew up front they would have no effective voice in FB's direction.
Facebook Testing $100 Fee To Jail Mark Zuckerberg (Score:2, Offtopic)
That's what I read, at first.
No, it doen't make sense. :)
They should read their own front page (Score:5, Insightful)
"It’s free and always will be."
Re:They should read their own front page (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's free and always will be."
MZ must like his privacy -- imagine that.
The facebook is still free, but the "cool" (i.e. rich) people will exist in a separate world. Almost surprising it took so long to separate the first and economy class. I am guessing MZ will never need to pay to message anyone.
Re:They should read their own front page (Score:4, Insightful)
"cool" (i.e. famous)
FTFY. Famous people are those who are known by many more people than they know personally. It is entirely reasonable that such people should need greater protection from unsolicited messaging.
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It should be, but someone who has claimed that privacy is dead and has a business model based on that assumption is not in a position to claim such protection without being a total hypocrite. And this is about privacy, having privacy means being left alone when you want to be left alone. If he can claim $100 for receiving a message I would like to claim $1, just 1% of wat Mark asks, for every fact about my browsing habits Facebook records, for every connection they make with data I can or cannot see, and pr
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That would be nice but it wouldn't be Facebook. At Facebook you are the product, you always have been, and you likely always will be.
A system which enabled people to be reimbursed for data aggregation and marketing based on their personal data may be possible with a distributed social network with PGP under the hood (uses have responsibility to protect their own private keys but they can pass this responsibility on to a business of their choosing and pay a tiny fee). I've not kept up with such projects bu
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I'd pay $100 (Score:2)
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That's about the "sign up" part that you left out of your quote.
You can still sign up and use it for free. Just some functions you have to pay for. Oh well, it's not that Facebook is essential for connecting to people. It's convenient, but by no means essential.
My prediction (Score:4, Insightful)
I predict that Slashdot groupthinkers will bash the idea of ever paying for Facebook messages as greedy, evil capitalism at its worst, etc., even though they overwhelmingly supported charging a fee to send emails to cut down on mass spam when that idea was being thrown around a few years back.
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Got no need to bash it - hell, I think he's allowed to do it all he wants. His servers, his rules.
Not sure anyone here ever agreed to charge $100/email during the previous conversations you refer to, though...
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Slashdot groupthinkers [...] overwhelmingly supported charging a fee to send emails to cut down on mass spam when that idea was being thrown around a few years back.
Mods? Why is this insightful?
Seriously... I don't know the conversation the AC is talking about (if it exists), but if any place were against charging a fee to send emails, it would be Slashdot. Who modded this shit up?
Politeness? (Score:3)
I assumed it was only polite to message someone who you like to add as friend, before or while you click 'friend'. ... I just know, they are not my friends ofc.
Now I assume I have just to click 'friend'. Albeit most of the people I know on FB
This is it: the beginning of the end (Score:5, Interesting)
When you scramble to monetize your product by pimping off your CEO you know it's downhill from here on.
Next:
- for 5 euros they will attach the head of one of your friends on a porn star
- charge 1 cent every time you use your FB login with another site
- charge $5 to add 50 new friends for the socially inept or people you need to get that extra mile
- for $1,000 bump someone off FB with the same name and get exclusive rights for 12 months
- $5 for audio greetings, $10 for video
-$1 to send a text message
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Oh they charge government much more than that and it's not just the FBI, it's NSA and DOD as well. What do you think that huge data center in Utah is for other than to scrape all the Facebook data and compile it along with all the commercial info they can buy and their secure data and mine it for "trouble".
funny (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:funny (Score:5, Informative)
My guess is that this is some kind of clumsy way of trying to get in on the LinkedIn gravy train. LinkedIn has a setup where you have to pay for a premium account to be able to message people you aren't directly connected to, and they actually pull in quite a bit of cash through that, because recruiters and various other kinds of businesspeople will pony up to send those messages.
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100$ to send him mail? After all that 100$ dosent even garantie you reply from him...
Of course not
You would need to pay at least $500 to guarantee receiving a reply from him. But with a monthly $5,000 fee, that price can be knocked down to $150.
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Forget reply, it doesnt even guarantee that he will read it. For all we know, he has some intern read his facebook messages and reply to it.
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Ya, I am sure his inbox already has a few hundred thousand unread messages from non-friends. I think the real story hear is that it is for all non-friends to anyone, not just him.
spellcheck (Score:4, Funny)
No. But they throw in a free spell check.
Already Sent a Message for Free (Score:2)
The Best Kickstarter (Score:3)
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Let's raise $10k to get 100 people to send Zuckerberg GNAA spam.
Yeah, let's give facebook $10k. That will show them.
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Spam? Really? Say goatse, and I'm in for $5.
I have a scheme testing $0.43 fee to mail Zuckerb. (Score:4, Funny)
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It's a better business plan than some dot-coms. At least you have some sort of revenue model.
Pssst.. (Score:3)
It's $0.45. $0.46 come Jan 27.
Attention economy (Score:4, Insightful)
I like the concept. Actually I think it is brilliant. There are gazillions of things that fight over our attention every day just as we open our eyes. We live in constant noise of commercials/e-mails/calls/banners/meeting-requests/u-name-it. And the most efficient way to reach a person is to be loud. And annoying. And it costs virtually nothing. And intermediaries - ad agencies etc. are those who take the most advantage and profit from this mess. But with this concept - everybody can charge for for their attention Directly . Maybe mr. everybodys attention starts to be Valued . IIn that case it would be like giving the power back to the people!
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I agree. But I think the key will be giving the recipient a cut.
I can do it for less.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Certified mail is a lot cheaper and will get his attention faster than someone paying $100 so his personal assistant will see the message.
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Because you can say that only the named recipient can sign for the mail by adding restricted delivery. It is not uncommon for legal documents to be sent certified with adult delivery and restricted delivery certified. That way you can get the best shot of saying that the service rules were satisfied (only if personal service fails) because the certified mail with adult delivery can be signed for by any adult who lives at the address and with restricted delivery, they will make multiple attempts to deliver
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Because Zuckerberg has this really awesome letter opener he's been itching to use.
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Certified mail is a lot cheaper and will get his attention faster than someone paying $100 so his personal assistant will see the message.
Even for $100, who says anybody will read the message, personal assistant, intern, janitor, or otherwise? There are several comments already implying that a human will actually read the email, but there's nothing in the article that implies there's any sort of guarantee or understanding that your $100 message will be read by anybody at all. It's not even a guarantee that a spam filter won't stop it, it's merely an "'economic signal' as one way to determine whether that user's message is legitimate."
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wonderful (Score:2)
I wish I could do this with my e-mail. I think I would like to charge any unsolicited e-mail senders 100 bucks too.
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Well your could if you ran your own mail server, couldn't you?
Just institute a whitelist of your "friends" and have an automatic bounceback for everyone else that links to a shopping cart that allows them to paste their email into a form. Charge them to complete checkout, which then forwards the contents of the form like the "special instructions" area of any e-commerce site's checkout page.
I think the problem here is what you really want is a system that automatically charges them just for sending to your
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I've thought about it and come up with something even better. A spam tax. All unsolicited spam to be taxed a nickel per recipient. Charge it to the ISP and let them collect it from the spammer. It should relieve the national debt in a short span....or eliminate spam. Win-Win.
I'll bet... (Score:4, Funny)
Hahaha. Facebook really is desperate.
I'm pretty sure that if you had something really important (a major business deal for example), it will still reach the main man just fine using mark.zuckerberg@facebook.com .
Purpose is to monetize spam (Score:5, Interesting)
99.97% reduction in spam (Score:3)
I get about 3 paper spam in the mailbox each day, because mail spam costs the sender several cents to send. Hmm, 1,000 versus 3. Seems like when the sender has to pay a few dimes each, that reduces spam by 99.97%.
Collecting postage from owners of hacked accounts? (Score:2)
But for different reasons: The spammers will find ways to avoid being billed themselves - having a habit of abusing the resources of others, they already are in people's PCs with their botnets, for crying out loud...
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Hmm, 1,000 versus 3. Seems like when the sender has to pay a few dimes each, that reduces spam by 99.97%.
99.7%, not 99.97%.
:)
I never correct grammar, that's obnoxious. But this is Slashdot - correcting math is allowed
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What's reprehensible about it? Facebook is giving you a free service. In exchange, they bombard you with advertising. Why should your "inbox" be anymore immune than your "wall?" Oops, I mean "timeline?"
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mod parent up.
If the fee would go to the recipient, we could be talking anti-spam measures. With the fee going to FB, it's just cashing in on spam.
Check your apps (Score:4, Interesting)
If Facebook will split this fee with the recipients, check your apps. How many of them have requested (and been granted) permission to send messages on your behalf? Could those apps send messages to persons not on your friends list (say the author of the app) and automatically accept the charge? If they can't now, how long before someone unscrupulous hacks it so it is possible and packages that up into a Farmville clone?
I will pay $100 to never hear about him again (Score:5, Interesting)
I would be willing to pay $100 dollars for a permanent media blackout so I will never have to hear about Mark Zuckerberg ever again. The only thing I might miss is a future story where he gets convicted by the feds for insider trading and fraud. But this is America were corporations and CEOs are effectively exempt from all laws so such an event ever occurring is slim.
Does he know? (Score:3)
I Can Tell Him To Blow Me For Free Here (Score:2)
I'm about to send him a message... (Score:2)
... though I doubt he'll pay attention: Deleting my Facebook account.
Ads on the right-hand side of the page aren't enough. They now feel a need to insert them into my news stream. (To be fair, the frequency of those has dropped off considerably. But if it starts up again, I'll probably be telling FB see ya.)
Pay me (Score:4, Insightful)
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You won't get paid, Facebook will. And the feature already exists, in a limited fashion.
Facebook is late to the party (Score:2, Interesting)
OKCupid already rolled this out a few months ago for all users. If a person's mailbox is full and someone tries to message them, they get a popup asking for a $1 "bribe" (their actual term) to have the message go the user anyway. Wouldn't be surprised if they also set up fake profiles of hot girls with "full" mailboxes. Easy money.
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Dating sites have always worked that way. Haven't you noticed how sites (especially AFF and their like) say "not real members" in really microscopic print on their ads?
Obligatory form (Score:5, Funny)
your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. your idea will not work. here is why it won't work. (one or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) it is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) it will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) users of email will not put up with it
( ) microsoft will not put up with it
( ) the police will not put up with it
( ) requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) open relays in foreign countries
( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) asshats
( ) jurisdictional problems
(x) unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) huge existing software investment in smtp
(x) susceptibility of protocols other than smtp to attack
(x) willingness of users to install os patches received by email
( ) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes
( ) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) extreme profitability of spam
( ) joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) technically illiterate politicians
( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) blacklists suck
( ) whitelists suck
( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored
(x) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) sending email should be free
(x) why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) i don't want the government reading my email
(x) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
( ) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work.
( ) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
(x) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Costs (Score:3)
I think this is brilliant... (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine you get more mail a day than you can read. You got two choices: spend significant time filtering through or risk missing the signal for the noise.
Now imagine every message in your inbox cost someone $100. First, it would significantly cut down on the volume. Second, if you know that a stranger spent $100 to write to you, you can assume it's not completely trivial - someone must have thought that what they have to say is so valuable that you're going to care and respond that they staked money on it.
Frankly, $100 is cheap. Say I have a startup idea that I think facebook would jump all over but I have no-one in my network who can help me bring it to FB's attention. I would GLADLY pay $100 for access to Zuckerberg - if $100 is enough to bring his inbox to a reasonable size such that my genuinely good idea could get the attention it deserves, it's well worth it. Frankly I think $100 is too cheap for someone at as high a profile as Zuckerberg.
Many of us get LinkedIn email from recruiters that we generally proceed to ignore. Now let's say a recruiter had to pay $5 to email me (if they weren't in my network): it would both cut down the amount of noise, and make me likely to take the email more seriously: if the recruiter was willing to put up money to make me aware of his opportunity, maybe there's something there.
Similarly, imagine it cost $5 to send your resume to a company. It would immediately stop people submitting their resumes for every posting in the world. The company could rely on the fact that any application for any position is from someone who genuinely believes they are a match and perhaps do away with machine resume filters, if the volume was brought down enough. In other words: although it would seem "greedy" to charge people $5 to apply for your job, it would end up meaning that more of the better candidates made it further through the process.
In general, putting a $ figure on a communication significantly increases the signal to noise ratio. $100 for Zuckerberg's attention is fair. $5 for my attention on LinkedIn is probably fair too - especially if I could set my own price. If I don't get anyone contacting me, I drop the price. If I get too many bogus offers, I raise it.
F*ck You Zuckerberg (Score:2)
but will he read it? (Score:2)
Permission to send an email is meaningless if there is no indication he will read it. Presumably he has a small army of people handling corporate and personal communication. Let's look at the economics of his reading your special message:
If we assume he will be earning $1B this year (argue if you will, I don't care), and he works 200 days, that means he makes $5M/day or $625K/hour or around $10K/minute. He gets paid $50,000 to take a dump during working hours.
Now here's your $100 message. Does he really wan
Re:Beautiful (Score:5, Insightful)
Just pay $1.59* and exercise your right to free speech!
... compensate for your brazen use of the First Amendment.
Oh, come on. I dislike Facebook as much as the next person, but what "free speech" and what "first amendment" are you talking about??
Facebook is a private enterprise. Until they are a government agency (not yet), free speech/1st amendment does not apply. Totally irrelevant
This might not even be a money grabbing move as much as "rich people should have their privacy" despite being on Facebook. M.Z. had one of his family Thanksgiving photos published against his wishes recently -- he was pretty annoyed about that.
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I don't think most people who mention the first amendment to the US constitution on Slashdot have much idea of what it says or what it means. They only really get three words "freedom of speech" and extrapolate wildly from there. The "Congress shall make no law" part gets completely lost. And that's saying nothing about the supreme-court-approved exceptions, nor the many supreme-court-tacitly-approved exceptions.
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How much of Facebook does the government have to own/run before it becomes liable to the first amendment?
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What this is is a "if you're not on my FBfriends list (IOW, a spammer or other complete stranger), you're going to pay through the nose for wasting my time sending me messages through FB's internal email system.
Hell, I wish I could do that sort of thing on my regular email - most of what I get every day is spam, and it would be nice to have the extra income....
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Yes, except that Facebook gets the money, not you.
There better be a way to disable this dumbass function as a recipient.
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For most of Facebook users that whole US constitution thing is something foreign anyway.
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Re:Thanks! (Score:5, Informative)
I'll just use e-mail instead.
mark.zuckerberg@fb.com
mzuckerberg@fb.com
or just dial the weasel directly...
(650) 543-4800 x9825
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Re:Trolls will do what Trolls do. (Score:5, Interesting)
Reminds me of the diamond ring item in Team Fortress 2. Costs a hundred bucks and when you uses it you essentially propose to another player in front of everyone logged in. To this day (like a year or more after inception) you still see people using it for memes or general trolling and what have you.
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