I may start using Facebook again

It has been a long time since the last time I spent much time on Facebook daily. It is true that many people use Facebook to update and spread the news, and sharing really good stuffs. Sadly, they only account for a few percent. The rest was not that inspirational. To me, Facebook was some kind of a stage where lonely souls expressed their feelings in order to attract attention from others. However, recently, there have been two “innovations” coming from Facebook that may change how we use Facebook and perhaps, the whole Internet world.

I will talk about the first innovation, also the more important one. It was the idea to collect fee when you send a message to an inbox of a complete stranger. The fee varies among $1 to $100 and depends on many factors such as how close you and the receiver are linked or how famous that person is. It may take up to $100 if you want to send Mark Zuckerberg a message. That idea seems stupid because no one would pay such a lot of money to send a message to another person while they can do it for free with e-mail? Facebook must be in very desperate need of money then. It is true that Facebook is facing some problems at the moment. However, such problems are not big enough for them to risk their reputation for a little money. If we look closely and carefully at the idea again, you may find it may shape how we use Internet and even get rid of e-mail. Normally, our e-mail receives mails from our friends, or the people we know, and from complete stranger, mostly advertising companies. The current Internet world has led to a fact that we may get tens of mails every day and most of them are annoyingly undesirable. Those unwanted mails usually come in bulk and are called “spam”. With the advance of technology nowadays, we have made great effort to reduce the spam. However, such move is never good enough. We still sometimes receive e-mails luring us into using some medicine and more badly, sometimes we have to check the whole spam box because we are afraid we may miss some important one. Here comes the solution: Facebook. Facebook’s new idea restricts people from spamning other people inbox. If you are not on the friend list of a particular person, you have to pay to send him a message. And unless it is some kind of important business, no one will pay to do that. That makes those advertising companies no longer able to send thousands of e-mails simultaneously. We are free from the fear of spam. However, not only do users benefit from that idea but Facebook also does. First, the money. Then, the users. If people want to send message with no charge, they have to get other people to use Facebook and be on their friend list. After months of slow growth, Facebook has finally found a new way to get users and to get their users more connected. Now that more people will recognize the new power of Facebook message, it will ring a bell to other companies. Currently, we are using Gtalk for chatting, iMessage for SMS, Skype for Video call, Gmail and Hotmail for mail. Now we have Facebook messenger which can do all these tasks. And the most crazy part is that not only is Facebook Messenger free but it also is better. I believe, in the not so far future when people get used to idea of using Facebook for everything, Facebook phone will appear and it may be the end of other companies.

Though the idea of collecting fee seems big and promising, it has not come to reality yet. There is another innovation from Facebook recently and it is very near to us now. I want to introduce to you the new search engine of Facebook: Graph Search. Again, Facebook would look stupid if it wants to compete with Google and, perhaps Bing, in the search battle field. Google has become a verb already. However, Facebook does stand a good chance of winning this game, at least among their users. Normally, we use Google to ask THE WORLD about everything. Now we can use Facebook to ask OUR FRIENDS AND THE WORLD about everything. It changes the way how you put those key words into the search field. With Facebook, you may ask and figure out “restaurants liked by friends living in my hometown” or “books read by friends who works at a bank”. It is true that you can still ask Google for such things. However, the answers may not be as satisfied as Facebook’s. So how are your Facebook’s answers different and event better than Google’s? It is because the Facebook’s answers come from your friends who are somehow not so different from you. In other words, the answer is personal. It aims directly at you. If the idea comes into practice, and it will do, it will make all the “Like” and “Checking” make sense because Facebook’s new search engine works according to that. That is one of many moves move from Facebook to make everything connected. There have been relationship pages and now the graph search. Now I can easily find photos of me and my girlfriend. More interestingly, if Facebook cannot show the result, it will show Bing’s links. It will make Facebook search not so different from Google because Bing is already a big competitor in the game. The only concern will be the privacy. But Facebook has already updated a new privacy policy to help user control their content better. I have to say that I am really looking forward to experiencing the Graph Search. And I believe most of us will spend some hours searching for weird things such as “friends like Justin Bieber and Nicky Minaj”.

In the battle among the Internet giants, there is hardly any bad move. There have been rumors about Facebook going down soon. However, such scenario will not come soon in the near future. Those two new innovations will not only help Facebok go father but also may shape the Internet world again.

Kz

Jan, 2013

Collecting ATM Fee: Why so serious?

Since March 1^st, a new law which allows banks to collect fee from ATM interbank transaction will come into practice. Before the new law, banks are not able to charge their customers for transaction from their own ATM.  However, the new policy has raised many negative reactions from the public. Why do people complain about that? And are they making sense?

Lots of comments on the law express a desire to know why banks still charge fee while their money at bank account receives only a very low interest rate. They compare their current account with the deposit account which receives much higher rate and then state that they have already paid the transaction fee through the low rate of their account. It is true that the current account always have a lower interest rate than deposit accounts. But that does not mean the customers do not have to pay for the service they use. The ultimate rule in economics goes “there is no free lunch”. Since the birth of personal property, people have always looked for a safe place to hide their property. They have used boxes and anything which has a hole and a lock. They have buried money in their garden or put it in the roof top. Now, we have a better way to keep our money safe: banks. We deposit our money into our bank account and are freed from the fear that one day a theft will make us a beggar. We can withdraw our money at any moment. We do not need to carry lots of cash and instead use a small well-protected plastic card to pay for our purchasing. We can do all that due to our bank. And we still demand them to pay more money for us and supply service for free? Put ourselves in a bank’s shoes and consider whether such demand is fair. In Vietnam, however, banks still pay for our current account in order to encourage people to stop using cash. In contrast, in other developed countries, such as America, current accounts do not receive any interest rate because it is against the law. Therefore, to attract more customers, those banks provide many free services, such as ATM transactions. So, your call: Interest rate or 1,000VND [$0.05] for each occasional transaction? I am not rich man. I am kind of poor instead. But I still have to wonder what we can do with 1,000VND these days?

There are many comments about the fact that ATM system is too bad and therefore banks do not deserve to collect the fee. I myself experience some frustration when I try to withdraw money from the ATM. But to say that the whole system is too bad is not completely true. There are moments that the system does not work well due to some reason such as overloading, … There are some banks that do not have strong ATM systems. Sometimes, I passed by lots of ATM though I was in need of withdrawing money because they were not from my bank. I was afraid of being overcharged. Due to the new policy, all banks are now in one price standard. Now, there are only 2 kinds of ATMs: my bank’s ATM and others. And I can know how much I will be charged. The new policy will connect the whole system, which will make it better and therefore, deserve the payment. Moreover, fee will actually help to improve the system, at least better than when the banks do not collect it.

Perhaps people have not carefully looked at the new policy. The new policy only regulates the cap price, which means the maximum fee that a bank can charge us, not the floor price. Banks can still choose not to charge. They can apply any price in the range from 0VND to 3,000VND. If you are not satisfied with your bank’s fee policy, just turn to other banks. Of course, at first, there will hardly be any banks which have a lower fee than others. However, competition will make banks run a race to reduce their fee in order to attract more customers. Some people may not be able to change their bank because their boss uses it to pay their salary. But think again and further, why does the boss keep using the bad banks? There must be some benefits for both him and the company that they are working for.

Since I study economics and banking, sometimes I have small lesson for the new comers. Always before my lesson about banking, I asked them about their reasons to choose a bank. The answers usually were safety (in the first place), interest rate (in the second place) and convenience (in the third place). There was little concern about the ATM fee.  Now we are exaggerating the whole thing. Some people have already declared to stop using ATM and instead turn to bank service at big buildings which can take much more time. It is their choice and therefore we cannot say whether they are right or wrong to do that. However, to me, I would be very appreciated if they do that. Now that less people use the ATM, the whole system will get smoother. I will enjoy a better service and perhaps even get a job, because the demand for banking tellers is rising.

And good luck waiting at the chair. You’d better go to the bank early to have a good number.

Kz