Facebook gouging Australian customers for purchases as well
In an effort to find more ways to monetize the site, Facebook recently introduced the ability to pay for a story to be highlighted in your friends news feeds. I'm not too sure why you would want to pay for this feature, however the merits of the highlight system isn't in question here. The price between users globally is.
In the USA, this fee is $2 USD per post you want to highlight. I just happened to notice a highlight button when I posted some photos recently and checked it out. I was stunned to notice that Australians are forced to pay $7.70 AUD for the privilege!
While the Australian dollar has recently dipped below parity compared to the US dollar, $1 AUD currently equals $0.97 USD. According to Facebook however, one Australian dollar should be the equivalent of $0.26 USD.
Australians have been, and continue to be, on the wrong end of product cost conversion for years but it has recently come to light just how much we are getting ripped off; particularly for digital goods.
ZDNet (http://www.zdnet.com.au/australians-to-pay-more-for-adobe-cs6-339336463.htm) uncovered one of the worst offenders, Adobe, and discovered Australians pay up to $1350 more than our US counterparts for the CS6 Master Collection; $3929 AUD compared to $2599 USD. This would still value the AUD higher than Facebook does at $0.66 USD.
There really is no genuinely good reason for this practice. Maybe iTunes has some reason for their price differences because of the different agreements they would have with local music companies, but there is no cost difference for Adobe and Facebook to provide these services and products to customers here compared to the US. The hope of the internet economy was to remove the regional differences, not exaggerate them.
Why people flip-out over Flipboard
OK, first up I promise this is my last post about Flipboard....for tonight.
So why am I (and many others) going on about Flipboard being released on Android? Cause it's one of the best, if not the best, news/RSS/social reader app available. It was a major justification for me to buy an iPad, and I know many others who felt the same.
Turning your ordinary RSS/news feeds into a magazine format makes it a breeze to browse and presents usually dry, static content in a visually stimulating way. But it's real standout feature in my eyes is it's twitter integration.
One of the main issues I've always had with Twitter is that while great content is available, you always have to follow a link to get to it. So a lot of the time, I wasn't encouraged to visit the links as the twitter post about it was often too short, and unable to capture my interest.
Where Flipboard adds value to this experience is by preloading some of the content from the twitter link (main picture/article title/introductory blurb) and displaying it in a easily readable format with a focus on the article linked rather than the tweet itself. This allows me to have a much better idea about what the link is about and raises the likelihood of browsing to that link myself.
The other advantage is that I can use Twitter lists to curate the content that I consume for various topics such as news and technology. A twitter list I have generated is a Perth news list; in which I add the twitter accounts of local news sources. It includes some well known, major news organisations but also smaller independent news companies that I would not have access to normally via mainstream media.
These are the type of apps that are showing people just what is possible in the post-PC era.