Well I don’t think they are directly related, just wanna talk about them (separately I guess).

Joined Facebook a few months and not particularly active with it. Originally I thought they’re a popular platform for researchers (at least in US), and also a bit curious on how they make money by providing yet another social networking service. After “been there” for a while I can confidently confirm that they are not for work purpose at all (unless I count that some previous students adding me as their friends is “work” related). Very soon I get invited from my families, relatives and friends as well. My sister-in-law “bites” me in Facebook and turns me into a zombie, while others want to “fight” or “gamble” me. Yeah, I think we all become kids again.

Besides from the functionalities offered by Facebook, they allow third party add-ons to be “plugged” in seamlessly as native components. There are like thousands of those and some of them are pretty interesting. For example I can do a movie quiz by giving ratings to 30-40 movies, and see how much I match with my friends in terms of movie taste. Or I can identify all the countries that I have been to so far in my life on a map. While I am filling in all kinds of information about me just for fun, suddenly I realize it is not just my friends who would be seeing them. All the data would be sent back to the companies who produce those add-ons, and perhaps Facebook would have a pretty good idea of who I really am by all the information I supply, volunteerly. Perhaps this explains how Facebook generates its revenue – acting as a platform of personal information, where each of those third party add-on is a company, capturing and trading data of all kinds for their own purposes. It is a brilliant C2B business model. I probably would never answer a survey about a list of movies and rate them separately; but if it is a quiz to show how compatible I am with my friends then I’ll spend the time to do it.

So what about ticket scalping? Recently heard a discussion about it among the hosts in radio and they were talking about ways to avoid people to resell tickets to concerts or sport events etc. People in general hate ticket scalper because they inflate the price of tickets and make them less affordable. Some even argue that they are both immoral and illegal.

Wait a minute – why do we have ticket scalping in the first place? It is because there are people believing the price set for the ticket is lower than it should be. So what should be the “right” price? It should be at a level where supply meets demand. Now, for whatever reason that the event organizer has to set the price lower than the equilibrium price level, demand exceeds supply and so not everyone who really wants to go to that concert can go. Ticket scalping is actually a mechanism for allowing the price of ticket to be more market-driven, is a way to “correct” the mistake of pricing the tickets in the beginning. Besides they are taking away some risks that the event organizer have originally, there is really little reason for them to publicly criticize their “business partner” here. “Selling the ticket below normal price to honor the fans” is just BS. Ticket scalping is simply a predictable activity in a free market, and price control is exactly the opposite of it. Changing the law to incriminate the activity would only promote it to go underground. The real problem is not ticket scalping, is the pricing of the ticket.

Hmm… maybe Facebook and ticket scalping are somehow related – people judge them by their apparent appearance, rather than their real nature!