Regards,
Vinny.
Owner of website: http://www.FreeOnlineCashNow.com

That said, research shows that user reviews are highly influential to many purchase decisions, particularly when the review comes from the consumer's own network.

I'm an avid student of the intersection of Search and the Social Graph and can't help thinking the next generation of Search will probably come from this crossbreeding. Maybe the next generation of Google-caliber intent harvesting will follow?

Some of my recent thoughts on the topic:
Docs are Old School, We Need PageRank for People
http://bit.ly/128U9V

I'm thinking it relates to their perceived value – it's tough to justify a $1B+ valuation when you're only bringing in $20M in ad revenue.

Until then, like Vijaya Sagar comments above we continue to do what we love to do.

Let's put it this way: I'm an art student. In traditional critique language, is this post 2d (because it appears on a flat screen) or 4d (because there will be time delays with any response)?
Next, is this world a medium of images- there are lots of images here? Text- lots of text? Where does code fit in?

How fully realized are you, and how fully plastic are you here?

Where are individuals, particularly average non-techie webbie whatever individuals conception of home on the internet? How about work on the internet? Is there a difference? What if there isn't? What if there is? How do we perceive the tools we use to access it?

We've barely grappled with these questions. (I do my fare share of reading.) Once we start attacking at the idea of people and internet and space and how we intermix these ideas, we'll have a variety of new ways to rethink a whole lot of these models.

In the meantime- where is my front door on the internet?

As allways, a pleasure reading you.

Location: “where people spend time” as you mentioned. In many cases that is not on twitter's property, but rather 3rd party clients.

Intent: You have brought this up a few times recently and it is key. I go on google with an intent. Twitter runs in the background and I rarely have a transactional or monetizable intent there.

We should not confuse a big user base and activity with monetizable traction. I am sure they'll make money. Not sure they'll ever make GOOG size money. Nor am I sure that the revenue potential could justify the capital they have raised or the valuations they have received.

agree. but while the money used to come at the expense of traditional advertising budgets, we are likely to start seeing one tech giant make money at the expense of another tech giant, rather than old media. afterall, that money that's following has to come from somewhere, not an infinite bucket of ad dollars fun times!!

1. Do you have a reference for the statement?
2. Do you see the Internet as just another medium?

I believe we will continue to explore new ways to create, capture and monetize ideas the next 15 years. One thing to remember is that not all online businesses need to be Google or Facebook size. As the Internet increasingly enables business models with low cost structures, many profitable models will occur further down the tail, perhaps not showing up on the Google and Facebook radar.

Anders
The Business Model Database

“The optimistic view (which I tend to hold myself) says that where people spend time, money will follow. If people are spending all their time on Facebook and Twitter, the Proctor and Gamble’s of the world will eventually find an effective way to shift the bulk of their ad spending online.”

This totally makes sense. For some companies like Google, their first break through product (search) leads to amazing and instantaneous revenue opportunities. They can then do R&D to figure out how to migrate those users to other potentially revenue yielding applications and experiment a bit (gmail/maps/voice/etc). Others consumer hits (Facebook/Twitter) may need to incrementally tweak features until they hit something that will yield high ROI on that feature/product. But does that mean that Facebook has no chance of being the next Google? (Taken from your tweet stream). In some ways, because Google found their cashcow so early, they have to, at least relatively, act more conservatively. Whereas a Facebook/Twitter has their primary assets in their users and will consistently try to make incentivize third-party applications that enhance the value proposition to that asset.. paving the way for them to skim a bit off of others (as Fred Wilson mentioned) down the road, automatically diversifying their revenue streams in the process. Love to hear your thoughts.

FWIW, my guess is that the rate of totally new business creation online will slow down and in it's place will come those who improve upon things that are already done online. FB and Twitter are entirely new concepts – neither really had any parallel in the offline world or in the online world for that matter (though isn't FB just a Friendster whose software did not crash during it's hyper growth phase?).

In the offline world, Sephora did not invent cosmetics retailing but it refined it to great success. Target did not invent the idea of a big box discount retailer but it won away many customers from the likes of WalMart and others by improving on it. I expect that the next major phase of online innovation and profitability will come from upstarts who improve upon existing – profitable – concepts whose roots are in the late 90s or early part of this decade and who have failed to innovate and keep themselves fresh.

And to use your specific example of Google, it's a once in a generation event. Even Microsoft did not grow as rapidly or as singularly. No doubt, the OS monopoly gave Microsoft its start but to make Google money, Microsoft had to out execute again and again in many new businesses. I don't expect we'll see a business as profitable, singular, and as meteoric in growth as Google for a long time to come. Until someone makes a dramatically better search algorithm and does to Google what Google did to Altavista.

As an entrepreneur in this space, I think on these lines:
- I like what the product I am creating [even if I am the only user ever]
- [Most of] those who use it will like it too
- Users will gladly spread the word around, if the product is compelling
- Money (big/medium/small) will follow users

While each one of us must dream to create the next GOOG, we should be perfectly comfortable and happy if we succeed on a smaller scale respectably (ex: Basecamp).

There are theoretical limitations on indefinitely sustained large scale successes in any economic system. Do you read Minsky (I once saw Krugman on your blogroll)?

I agree with Fred that some form of micropayments is probably the best bet, but I wonder if you can get Google scale from the virtual goods market.

There's another huge issue here and that's the digital acumen of people holding the bulk of the media dollars. In short they haven't a digital clue and the kind of advertising they do does not lend itself well to a user controlled medium. I'm not sure that gap will be bridged without radical innovation on both ends. A tall order.

Agree, virtual goods are very interesting and could be the next big business model on the web. For FB in particular, it's brought the “purchase” (actually usually more like someone take a SuperRewards survey) much closer to the ad.

second, the social gaming companies are printing money on the facebook
platform. that shows how powerful that model is. they'll need to figure out
how to tap into that revenue stream and i think they will

The situation is not helped by the presence of so much subsidized free stuff on the web. Subsidies can either be internal (eg Google) or external (eg VC money).

It's tough to compete with free.