I was watching the Social Network movie with my wife, when she asked me how facebook.com is monetized ? It was a good question for which i had no good answer. She hates facebook btw and calls it an invasion of privacy. Different generation i guess. All my queries to people ended with about 52 million users etc so something must happen.
While i am sure that the guys running it know what they are doing, IMHO social networks cannot be directly monetized. People use it because its there and free. Once you have ad’s (seems to be the easiest indirect monetizing strategy) the whole thing kind of sucks.
So i think that the fate of social media is to be acquired by the guys who own the pipe and can monetize traffic. Keep adding heavier apps and more options for IP traffic == revenue. Lets see…
I take this stand as its pretty much what pushed me from software services to real products. Once open source matured in the 2000 time frame i was kind of convinced that commodity software products are a race to the bottom. Only time will tell.
Abey John
There is also a deeper story about the incosystem – my coinage for the information ecosystem – and it speaks to a fundamental shift in the way we disseminate, consume, and profit from information. Looks like we are on a trajectory that will take us dead center into Peter Hamilton’s Night Dawn Trilogy. In the words of the famous seer – you ain’t seen nothin yet. Billionaires will be passe what’s coming are the trillionaires.
There are 5 billion (and counting!) yet to enter the consumer centric economy and experience its joys thereof. Either that or we Soylent Green ourselves. Everything the 20th century seers foresaw is coming – the internet has just accelerated delivery.
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
First and foremost, I would like to publicly apologize to Abhimanyu – the author of this post.
Last evening when Rahul (the social head of Babyoye) declared that they could not even ‘locate’ this order and hence cast doubt on the transaction itself, I grew restless. All evening and till late night and early morning, I was on tenterhooks, ‘coz in the end, it was the reputation of the Oyebaby business that is in question.
Both Rahul and I repeatedly tweeted Abhimanyu, but he did not respond.
This morning, I kinda succumbed into believing that Abhi had made a mistake and warned him on Twitter to either provide facts or be declared a “phony”. I even told Rahul to prepare a defence blog favoring Oyebaby that I would promote.
Just then, Abhi appeared and promised details that he was expecting from his sister. He also mentioned that his net was down yesterday and that is why he went silent on twitter and on the reminders.
An hour back he has posted all the details!
Abhimanyu, I am SORRY and APOLOGETIC for losing my cool and calling you a phony.
Thank you for being patient with me.
Now, Oyebaby, YOU guys have some SERIOUS SERIOUS explaining to do!!!