Yes, it's almost 2am and I'm still on FF. And Friday is now over...
Tonight I drove from Pottstown to Brooklyn, NY and back. I was picking up The Actress for her spring break week. I'm glad she's home. - Jim #teamFFrank
The trip was sad. I spent pretty much the entire drive thinking about how disempowered I feel as a result of FF being shut down. - Jim #teamFFrank
Some of the most significant moments of my life were shared with this community. You all played a bigger role in my life between September of 2010 and January of 2011 than did most of the people that I have met in person. I tried to say that about 5 different ways, like "know personally" but I do know many of you personally even if we've never met. - Jim #teamFFrank
And that got me thinking about how many people in the FF community could say nearly the same thing. And then I started thinking about what kind of calculus goes in to a decision to shut down a community like this. Finally, I wondered why we were given a "thanks for your support" but no say in how or if this community should continue to exist. - Jim #teamFFrank
Where I wound up was, well, nowhere in particular. I wish I could tie my thoughts up in a wrapped package with a bow, but my ruminations just sort of ended with: It was ours. Not theirs. Why are they taking it? - Jim #teamFFrank
Jim: First of all, *hugs*. I sympathize and agree with what you wrote, but I personally can't blame Facebook for shutting it down. It's a cost for them, and probably not an insignificant one (probably around $100,000 to $200,000 a year, at least -- factoring in storage, bandwidth, hardware maintenance, and personnel costs to handle that). And what do they get? There's zero revenue. And while some of us would pay, how many would? It would never be a big enough money-maker to justify the opportunity cost of anything they put into it. Ultimately, Facebook is a business, and they have to focus on their core web site. As to why now? Every time there was an outage or an escalation or a hardware failure or a security incident, this place got on some VP's radar, and at some point, they felt like they'd kept the place running long enough. Without Paul or Bret there to push for it, there was no one at Facebook left to advocate for us. And so now it's come to this. - Stephen Mack
200k a year? What's that to Facebook? Why not monetize it in some. Ah, it's no use arguing. I was just putting it out there. - Jim #teamFFrank
Yeah, it's nothing to them, either way -- which was your point. - Stephen Mack
2 am also for me every night since THE news :/ - did