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.

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

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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.

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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.

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Linux.com: When we looked at Flock 0.9 last year, the social Web browser showed a lot of potential. Now that it's over the 1.0 hump, the Flock team has made good on the application's promise. Maybe too good -- while Flock serves up a lot of content on a single page, you practically need super-powers to take it all in. Once you cut back on the sensory input a bit though, it's a pretty slick Firefox alternative for anyone with a ton of cyber friends.

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"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."

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