Last night, a Mashable reporter named Chris Tayler tried to message Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook.
What Tayler saw next was incredible. Facebook told him he could send Zuckerberg a note, but that it would get stuck in Zuckerberg's spam filter.
That is, unless Taylor was willing to pay $100.
This is what the message looked like:
This morning, we tried to recreate this scenario, but it didn't work. We wrote and sent Zuckerberg a message and never saw the $100 offer. We aren't "connected" with Zuckerberg, either.
What's probably going on here is that Facebook was testing a version of a new feature we've been hearing about for a while now.
At the end of last year, reports surfaced that soon, Facebook would charge users $1 to send a message to someone they are not friends with on the service.
See, Facebook would like you to use its messaging service instead of email.
The problem with this plan is that traditionally, Facebook users have only been able to send messages to people they are "friends" with on Facebook.
To fix this issue, late last year, Facebook made it so anyone could message anyone on the service.
But this change opened Facebook users up to spam – something they aren't used to getting through Facebook messages.
So that's why Facebook wants to charge people a dollar to send a message; it's supposed to filter out spam.
Maybe what Taylor saw last night was another version of this plan – perhaps one where users can set their own price for how much it costs to reach them.
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