A couple months ago, I wrote about Voxox, an application to tie together various messaging applications.
A number of bloggers commented over the holidays on the shift in focus of their entrepreneurial friends to social media applications, especially because of difficulty making a living on pure play VoIP.
Isn’t there still a question of monetizing social networking businesses? In this economic climate, it isn’t clear to me that multi-zillion dollar cheques will be written without an understanding of the real revenues to be achieved, not just the popularity of an application.
It is one thing to attract customers; it is another to attract revenue.
RSS feeds enable a means for third party applications to disintermediate blog readers from the original publication site; aggregation tools can thereby capture the advertising revenues from the original content creator.
Will user fatigue set in as all of us continue to receive invitations to join all the networks to which our friends (our real friends) belong.
Will social media applications that tie together disparate networks result in the same revenue challenge?