Send Mark Zuckerberg a Facebook message for $100

Now, you can send a message to Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook and you can even have it delivered straight to his Inbox – just pay $100 and you’re good to go

Recently, various reports about Facebook charging its users $100 to be able to send a message that goes straight to Mark Zuckerberg’s Inbox have been sprouting all over the Internet like wild fire. And let me tell you, most reports were not very happy about it.

You see, it goes like this: All of Facebook users actually have two mailboxes – the “Inbox” and the “Other”. The Inbox is where messages from friends and families go, while the Other plays as the storage for messages sent by strangers, spammers and random people.

You might be frowning in confusion right now because you didn’t even know that Other exists. Well, go log in at your Facebook account and check your ninja mailbox right now! Some users were actually saddened to find out that even potential job offers were dumped in their Other mailbox, so better check it out now before it’s too late.

Because of this, a lot of skeptics are not pleased at Facebook’s move – how dare Facebook do this? Do they really need income that bad? Are they that desperate?

In their defense, a Facebook spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal in response to queries about the new pricing scheme. “We are testing some extreme price points to see what works to filter spam.”  

Well. Now that they’ve cleared this issue up, when you think about it, the experimentation does make sense. The presence of these two types of mail boxes is the root cause of Facebook’s experimentation – as to what heights would a person go just to be able to send unwanted and unsolicited messages from possibly random people? What methods can Facebook use in order to reduce incoming spam for users with huge fan bases and high counts of online subscribers?

If you remember, last year, Facebook started to test a feature that made use of people’s lack of knowledge about their ninja Other mailbox. The feature allowed random strangers to pay $1 per message to get their messages into the user’s Inbox mailbox.

To cease criticisms and get on its users’s good sides, here is an official statement regarding the tests and experiments that Facebook chose to release:

“Today we’re starting a small experiment to test the usefulness of economic signals to determine relevance. This test will give a small number of people the option to pay to have a message routed to the Inbox rather than the Other folder of a recipient that they are not connected with.

Several commentators and researchers have noted that imposing a financial cost on the sender may be the most effective way to discourage unwanted messages and facilitate delivery of messages that are relevant and useful.”

Currently, the tests have stopped ever since Mashable brought attention to it.

What do you think: would you pay $100 to have your message delivered to a famous person’s Facebook Inbox?