“On a social network, you’re the product rather than the customer.” That’s a blurb I took from Chris William’s article, “Facebook in Goldmine Potential Deficit,” published at The Register.
Does this describe the relationship between you and your social network(s), as you perceive it? No? Does the idea make you uncomfortable, then? Can you dispute it?
Williams makes a few poignant observations from a humanistic perspective, but those are really background noise to his major assertions: that Web 2.0 might be a bubble about to pop; that we might begin to see select Social Networks go belly-up, because they simply aren’t turning a profit (or in some cases, making any money whatsoever); and that some Social Networks might start charging users for basic services, such as video uploads.