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.