Paying a Price for Friends

Are you feeling forlorn on Facebook?

Wish more people would pay attention to your status updates?

Are you waving and no one’s watching?

Well, your troubles are over. Now there’s a handy-dandy way of getting more traction for your posts, photos and paraphernalia.

You just have to pay for it.

Facebook, reports Tech Crunch, is testing a “highlight” option in which you pay a few bucks to have more friends see one of your posts. Turns out a measly 12 percent of your friends see your average update now.

At the moment, only a small portion of Facebook users have this pay-to-play option, but there’s a free version to explore whether folks are drawn to this feature.

With Facebook preparing for its monster IPO on Friday, this obviously has implications for Mark Zuckerberg’s bottom line. But I’m more interested in what it says about us.

Facebook has obviously transformed itself from the bunch-of-friends-hanging-out model when it was just for college students and recent grads. And with Twitter becoming the go-to venue for many journalists, not to mention presidential campaigns, Facebook is obviously looking for ways to be part of a broader conversation. The “subscriber” option now means people like me can reach far more folks than can get it under the silly 5,000-friend limit.

At the same time, news organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on traffic generated by social media, rather than just Google searches. People trust their friends and are naturally interested in what they’re reading and watching.

But as this all gets more commercial, and the definition of “friends” gets broader, will the original aura of Facebook be lost? Could it become an e-commerce site with cute family photos? That would make it a business, which a public company needs to be, but definitely less friendly.