First off, I agree with you that complaining about free services shouldn’t be off the table.
Let’s look at Instagram. It’s a photo sharing service that lets you do very little with your photos. It entered a market that was full of photo hosting sites that were well developed and feature-rich. Flickr will let you upload a full size master photo and then offer up smaller resolutions for your users. You can replace the photo, group your photos into albums, change the order of your photos. You can follow other Flickr users, like/comment/share things, etc. And Flickr is just the one I’m familiar with, but there’s lots of others.
Instragram entered this market with a reduced feature set, not because the developers lacked skill and/or time, but because they had a vision for a different kind of service. You can upload a picture and apply a filter, and then your friends can like or comment. That’s pretty much it. But it was precisely this restricted functionality that made Instagram take off.
Facebook is a lot more complicated, of course, but one of the ways they reduced functionality to their advantage is that they made it really hard not to share things. The default privacy settings generally push the boundaries of what most users would pick if they had to set them up themselves. You can change them, sure, but you couldn’t always. And every time they update the privacy settings they take little steps to make sure your activity gets seen by more people.
Facebook makes money off this, yes, but this is really more about a philosophy. They want you to expand your social network on their site, and they do that by showing you activity from your friends that involves people you don’t know. This works really well; sometimes I’ll be like, “Oh hey, I met that guy once, he’s friends with Jim, and now I see that he likes the same music I like. I’ll just friend him because the button is right here.” And now FB has caused me to create one more connection that will keep me coming back.
Facebook wants you to keep posting new content because it helps with this philosophy of expanding networks. You’ll notice that it’s very hard to search through someone’s timeline. You can scroll through it but you can’t jump to a specific period in time, or search by keyword. Photos are really the only thing that exist as something you can flip through, and you get the feeling that FB would probably prefer it if you couldn’t.
In a lot of ways FB is a victim of its own success, expanding into areas it’d rather not be if not for the money involved (games, business pages, etc). At it’s core it’s a site designed to connect people who want to post status updates. It’s not a photo hosting site for a photographer who wants to update their images with watermarks, and the fact that they’re not catering to that sort of user is by design.
