Delicious shutting down - Is it the end of free in freemium ?

Delicious shuts down: One free web service I use frequently is biting the dust. I joined quite late into the delicious party but after I got used to it, the delicious bookmarklet was the first bookmarklet on my browser. It was really very good and I used to refer back to those bookmarks to find  - something which I remember having read but can't remember now - articles. I am really sad to see it go. If you have used delicious and want to atleast back up all the bookmarks you have saved, you can export all those bookmarks here.

Other shutdowns of popular products:  I think lot of web services will start to feel the heat and web services which are not able to to monetize may shut down or start to charge for services. Google shut down its notebook service also which I was using. Now evernote has taken that place which has premium accounts and it is rumoured to be making good revenue.Evernote has raised a lot of money and after the growth of the company peaks, it also might want to terminate its non paying customers. Ning a company which provides custom social networks removed the option of free from its packages and all the existing customers were asked to pay up or leave.

Will everyone start charging for services now?  There are two ways that a company can continue to provide its services for free, if it is either acquired by a big company - read google or microsoft or if it makes good money either by charging for services or by ads. Lets consider one by one

 Selling to a big company : Picnik, Youtube, GrandCentral (google voice) & many other companies acquired by google are still providing services for free. That doesn't mean it will always be like that. The founders of those companies will become rich but there is no guarantee that the services will keep running.  Delicious is best example of what will be wrong with this approach.If the new company thinks it is useless or does not fit in with its agenda, it will shutdown. So no company whose motto is selling to another company can be trusted to remain functional for ever.

Money from ads: Companies can make money by serving ads on the site. This is popularized by google. Blogger, Youtube, GMail and all big google properties are subsidized this way. Though there is no danger of these being discontinued in the short term there are some threats to this approach too. Adblocker extension on Firefox and Chrome will block all ads on a web page and you have to whitelist certain sites to enable ads like I enabled google.com to see ads from that site. And how many people will take that pain of enabling those ads?  And Facebook is giving a good threat to google. Don't you think with all the facebook connect information can't facebook show ads on the pages which have activated Facebook Connect ? I think it is only a short time before facebook starts federating its ads. If google loses its relevance or lot of people switch to facebook ads, is it possible that Google can keep supporting bandwidth hogs like Youtube indefinitely. This raises a question which webservice can be trusted to run forever? Which brings us to the third way a company can make money

Charging for services:  Companies can earn money the old fashioned way by charging for services. Lot of companies already charge for services but I think we will see more and more companies starting to charge for services.

Not everyone will start charging for services. Notably all those places which can attract lot of eyeballs like facebook, youtube or google might always be free because by their nature the more people they can bring they earn more. So they might make more than they use and hence they can be free but more services where it is not possible to be subsidized by ads, the companies will charge for sure.

How different it is from freemium ?
The difference is that you will not get free servies indefinitely. Today even if you will not pay you can use tumblr to host your blog indefinitely. Evernote allows you to save notes indefinitely even if you never pay anything to use it within a limit. But the difference which i see it the services will become time-limited. So you can only try but not really use a service. You have to pay to use it. 


I am not saying this is true for  news or other data where the cost of incremental stuff is zero but for web services where each new free customer has a cost associated with him/her however small the cost might be.

Update: A cool service call trunk.ly is poised to replace delicious not in the same way but now a days, if we like something we just share it on twitter or facebook, not to delicious right. Trunkly indexes the links we share on twitter or facebook and is searchable.. So grab a spot for this here

Imagining the Future...The Venus Project

I would like to tell you some stories... First two individual stories of Henry and Nitin... 

Henry were having a treat at their home because his daughter, Jane got admitted into Yale University. But the next day the family was aghast to know that they cannot send Jane his daughter to Yale. The reason was that Henry was laid off when his corporation downsized sending some of their jobs to offshore. Henry's job was fitting the precision gears in a car manufacturing company. It was a very specialized job and Henry was proud of it. He pretty much worked on the same thing his whole life and now suddenly he was left jobless. All the competitors of his company had also outsourced that job to some other country. There was no way he could get a new job so soon. All of his family's dreams were finished now. He just took a home loan to buy housing which was available cheap due to the collapse of the housing bubble. In just a few days his life became upside down..!!!

Nitin loved dancing but his father always wanted his son to study in IIT and hence pushed him. He would never allow him to practice dance and added to that he sent him to various coachings for IIT entrance from VIII standard itself. Grudgingly, Nitin moved forward till his +2. And the pressure from his father was increasing daily. On the results day,  Nitin's corpse came home. He couldn't pass his +2 exams. People who came to pay their last homages reminisced how well he had danced in the annual day celebrations in his college. 

So what did you fee? Did you feel that those two were unfortunate lot among all of us or that these are general trends in the society? 

What happens if all the jobs are outsourced and they have more people who don't have any work? What happens if the creativity of every child is nipped out in the bud and they are not allowed to do what they want to? What if a whole country has more people dependent on government subsidies rather than the money they earn? Do you find it difficult to imagine that in the future there might be water wars? What happens if a country doesn't have any energy and also doesn't have money to import it? These and many other thoughts were swimming in my mind before I gave up those thoughts. But by chance I discovered something called 'TheVenusProject' a project started by a scientist called   JACQUE FRESCO  who feels that we have all that is required to solve all the problems in the world. He says that we can go beyond politics, war and poverty and achieve a high quality of living for everyone. 

To give you a short summary of it. You all know that all the things we consume are coming from the earth only. If we need to produce something, everything physical is only coming from the earth. Money was invented as a means of exchange of value. But that is not sufficient now as with money it is possible to artificially alter the balance of correct exchange. Just imagine if there is no money. We can just walk into a shop and get whatever we want. See how much pressure it relieves on Henry's life. That means he need not worry about their food. If there is no obligation of earning money then why would anyone be stuck at a job which he doesn't like or why would Nitin's father push him to study in any particular college? It would grant human's enormous freedom to do what they want. Yes you might think then how will the work we do get done? There he takes the help of highly developed AI based machines which do most of our work. No, don't think tangentially like the bad robot in I, Robot. Robots are always machines and they just follow our instructions. You might get the doubts like how will people and what about the scarcity of oil and water? Jack again tells us various renewable energy alternatives and talks about building houses on the oceans. Now think about it again. Don't you think it is possible?

I certainly think that we are going in that direction only but the thing is that it might take a lot of time before people realize that money is not being used correctly. And the people who are at a a powerful position always want to maintain a status quo and hence it won't be short of another revolution before government stops using money. But then we would have moved into a  different phase of human evolution. It might not happen in our lifetime but surely it will happen. What do you think ?

There are couple of books available from his website. 

I it is way ahead of its time, but surely one day or the other this condition will be reached. And we as hopefuls can speed it up by spreading it. 

I am super excited about this. Hope it reaches majority of people in the world.

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