Facebook has started a new trial service where users can post a personal message to people who are not in their friend’s list by paying $1. This service will allow users to send the messages directly in the Inbox rather than the different ‘Other’ folder which currently contains the unwanted correspondence.
This is just a trial and is available only for the Facebook users in U.S. Besides charging a fee of $1, Facebook also will carry a limit of sending maximum one paid message per week and not more than three messages per month. There are no immediate plans to launch the trial for users in Europe, but it could happen in the future.
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, said Facebook.
Now if you want to send a message to someone you heard speak at an event but are not friends with, or if you want to message someone about a job opportunity, you can use this feature to reach their Inbox.
This aspect of paid messages was earlier adopted by the professional social networking site LinkedIn. LinkedIn users cannot send a message to people they are not connected with, without paying a monthly fee.
As far as Facebook messaging is concerned, users can already send messages to anyone on Facebook unless the user has made the privacy settings for that.
