[loceng]

Direct Mail spam. Even if this is something some businesses will pay for, and even if it isn't a lot of messages, it is still an annoyance.

Would there be 1,000 businesses willing to spend $1 million each to send a message to a million people? That's $1 billion. Can messages be targeted enough and give a good enough ROI? Will users be pissed off and dismiss businesses that put ads into their private inbox?

More negatives than positives, IMHO..

[lukasb]

Set caps on spam and auction the space, then. If the price of getting to your inbox is $10 people will have to have a really good reason for getting in touch.

I'm usually anti-FB but I'm curious to see where this goes.

[gcr]

Or, set the price to be a function of the number of messages the sender sent per day.

E.g. If I've sent `s` messages per day averaged over the last N days, the next message that I send should cost (rounded to the nearest penny):

   1.01^(s-1)

That'll put a damper on it right quick. Sending 100 messages will cost $168.79, sending 200 will cost $625.35.

[loceng]

I don't see this happening, as Facebook has no trouble abusing the userbase.

[jschuur]

Captchas?