It looks as if Laura Scott, pingVision, had some free time on her hands. There are reasons free servcies on the Internet are free. Laura wants you to start asking yourself, "why?".

Is the future really free?

It seems we've entered an age where there's a land-grab happening for personal data and attention time. Look at all the web start-ups backed by venture capital. They aren't investing out of philanthropy. There's value there. YouTube is "free" but Google paid over a billion dollars for it. Why?

Here's a hint: It's not about the Tube. [Read more at Laura Scott's Blog]

Personally, I'll need to read her post a few times and soak in on the information from her excerpts. Some things to think about...

eWeek: Yahoo's CTO offers a bold, promising glimpse of the future of the portal as a social network ... just as Microsoft prepares to move in.

Complete Story

eWeek: A Forrester report says social networking, RSS and mashups will be among the fastest-growing technologies by 2013.

Complete Story

Silicon.com: Social networking sites as infection hotbeds
The social websites are the big target now - MySpace, Facebook...People are less careful and more likely to click on a link or download something. They are open and people can put links or trade files with somebody. I refer to the latest threat report from Symantec, they are seeing a shift away from hacking individual computers to web-based threats.

Complete Story

The Social: Six Apart, the software company behind blogging platforms TypePad, Movable Type, and Vox, has launched a new Facebook application called "Blog It." Facebook members who install the application can post to multiple blogging services at one time, update their Facebook status in sync with micro-blogging services like Twitter, and have updates from the app appear in their Facebook Mini-Feeds.

Complete Story

"It further does not take a great leap to see how business executives could greatly benefit from being able to measure and monitor their energy and materials use in real time and share that information via a closed social network within their own company."

Eric Lundquist, "New Role for Social Networks", eWeek, March 14, 2008

"Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion has a nice writeup on the Trust Issue regarding startups and I just cannot agree more. History has shown that any startup which wants to gain a big userbase and wants to keep it needs to invest in trust. There are many examples already where it failed."

Complete Story

Matt Mullenweg, founder of the WordPress blogging application, recently announced on his own blog that his Automattic company has hired Andy Peating. Andy Peating is the creator of BuddyPress which is a WordPress Multui-User based social network platform.

It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.

This is significant news in a number of aspects and indicates the direction many of today's content management systems are taking or need to take (more discussion from me on this at a later date). A number of bloggers haven't missed the significance of this move by Automattic either. This TechCrunch post talks about the possibilities I'm also thinking about when mixing open source with social software:

As the Forrester Research analyst catalogues in a running tally, scores of vendors are now in the "white-label" social networking platform business.

Instead of a proprietary platform like LinkedIn or Facebook, such companies offer a framework to enterprises or individuals wishing to build an online community tailored to their tastes and needs. The platforms are being used for everything from marketing and branding to internal enterprise use.

Complete Story