DISQUS

louisgray.com: louisgray.com: Does a Service Need a Business Model to Have You as a Customer?

  • sarahcrisman · 11 months ago
    I think the primary concern about off-the-cuff services is that eventually, they need to turn some revenue to stay in business. As a user, my loyalty is won by the service itself, but I do get nervous with talk of acquisition and ad-support if I think it could somehow impede the value received. No one wants Twitter to turn into MySpace, and it certainly doesn't have to... I hope.
  • awilensky · 11 months ago
    There have been any number of on-line storage company failures, covered everywhere, that have left users SOL after spectacular business failures; no notice, no apologies. Ditto several web-based project management and vertical web services for rental property management. The bottom line - while the upside for web based services, like twitter, are fun, communication, etc., there are far more vertical industry web solutions that are even more thinly capitalized.

    Need I spell it out. While the boxed software industry must adapt, there is a certain comfort in having that local infrastructure, Also, sufficient capitalization is not the only guarantee that an on-line service will survive.
  • mikepk · 11 months ago
    It's all about the value equation. If no one is willing to pay for the value provided by these services then they will cease to operate. It's a fairly simple equation that we like to over complicate with all of these indirect, multi-party, business models. The precedent that everything must be free is an unfortunate one, one that business are going to suffer through for years to come. People are quick to point to advertising, but the number and level of service that advertising can support is limited. Additionally, what people fail to realize, is that when the advertisers are providing the revenue, then the incentives and goals of the service provider become skewed to servicing the advertiser.
  • Mike Smith · 11 months ago
    I have never stopped using a service/product just because I didn't know what their business model was. If we weren't business owners ourselves, would we even worry about that - or even know what it means? We'd more than likely just use the service and leave it at that. If it closes, it closes. I try to use products/services as if I wasn't a business owner. Less stress, headaches and number crunching that way :)
  • Hallicious · 11 months ago
    These sites are outreach systems and aggregators. The contacts I make on a no biz model network like Twitter or FriendFeed are portable. If I meet someone in one space, I can port that relationship to the other spaces where we share identities.The information I aggregate onto FriendFeed is my information to begin with and it will continue to exist on the internet until it implodes...
  • Meryn Stol · 11 months ago
    For this, I make a difference between corporate data and simply "talk". I wouldn't want a corporate communication platform to be hosted by a company of which I'm not sure if they're going to survive. Paid subscription is a good start, but if the service lacks traction it's in danger too.
  • Meryn Stol · 11 months ago
    I'd say: Let Friendfeed enable corporate Friendfeed "silo's" complete with rooms, everything. A non-public friendfeed. Charge per user per month, or whatever. Perfect internal collaboration tool.
  • Meryn Stol · 11 months ago
    This makes you wonder how far off an "open source" friendfeed clone is, for installation behind a corporate firewall.
  • Greg (GuitarBuster) · 11 months ago
    No, I have Sprint wireless.
  • Hutch Carpenter · 11 months ago
    I don't get concerned initially about the viability of any service. Most of them I try out, and then use sporadically. Once I get more vested in a service, my interest in its viability goes up. FriendFeed and Twitter are two of those services. I'm really not that worried about Twitter. The likes of Fred Wilson and Jeff Bezos are investors there, and the service has taken off. If it can nail the killer revenue model, it will be snapped up by a bigger player.

    FriendFeed is still so early, I don't sweat that either. It's got another round of funding in front of it before worrying about revenue. There are a lot of ways FriendFeed could go: social network, personalized information management service, enterprise (as Meryn notes).
  • Dean · 11 months ago
    Well, if you are not paying (into a business model) you aren't a customer, you are a user. So as long as a service provides some kind of value to me, I would use it.
  • Jeroen de Miranda · 11 months ago
    I agree with Hutch: FriendFeed is a compelling service, and still early in its market cycle. Because many leading social media expert are using this platform (or are even moving from Twitter to FriendFeed because of perceived additional functionality (e.g. Jeremiah Jowyang); in contrast to the move of last summer as a result of frequent downtime of Twitter); FriendFeed will definitely have a great future.
  • MayankDhingra · 10 months ago
    Not really. Financial viability of a service is the last thing that crossed my mind while using it. Though given the way pownce closed and Jaiku has gone into a black hole(almost) its a bit worrying.

    The biggest concern of loosing a service is a) loss of data b) loss of connections and chances are that if you really connect with someone on one service. You might also add them to another service, say LinkedIn, from which you can always maintain contact. So if time and option to save one's data are given, not much issues really.