Thanks for the comment. Good point about the ‘upgrade business model.’ That’s definitely the other angle that works when trying to monetize social media – give people a taste for free and then get them to pay for exclusive content, expert services, or some sort of service guarantee (in the dating world, I believe this is called “marriage” ; )

That post about profile pics is definitely one of their better ones – must have taken a long time to go through all those pictures and codify them (i.e. add the metadata for analysis). According to the methodology, they used over 7,000 pictures: “We finalized our data pool at 7,140 users. Aside from running each picture through a variety of analysis scripts, we tagged, by hand, each picture for various contextual indicators. We double-checked the tags before generating our data.” Wow – that’s a lot of work, especially to give away for free. (I guess automated methods aren’t yet available to let you know if a picture is a “MySpace Shot” or not.) When you think about the work that goes into these, I think it reinforces my point about the demand for (and cost of) sense-making amidst all that data. I think this will be especially true as we deal with more and more unstructured data like text, pictures, and video. Just imagine what Facebook could do if they had some way (assuming they don’t already) of analyzing all of the user photos they host. By their own admission, users upload more than 3 billion photos to the site each month!

I found it particularly interesting because I suspect the type of profile picture has a profound impact on the volume of conversations and type of person it attracts. I always love the expression “don’t judge a book by its cover” simply because I find it ironic that everyone judges a book by its cover, at least in the initial stages of attracting your attention, the key first step to any engagement. Increasingly I believe we make snap judgements about information based on a incredibly small amount of information due to the limitedness of our time and the abundance of media available. The profile pictures are one example but it could extend to all manner of media consumption such as whether or not a 140 character tweet’s descriptives are “structured” to attract attention and clicks, or the same with a blog post title. Ads that look like ads get tuned out, as an example.

I think you’re right on the money about the real value being in the data. With a good free service to facilitate user engagement and the collection of data, companies will surely be interested in accessing this aggregate info, but I can also easily see a lot of people willing to buy upgrades that make their experience even better, especially if the free experience is compelling enough to capture the user in the long run. How much would an individual be willing to pay for additional information or tools that would help them do something another site can do? Probably not a whole lot, but if that service suddenly helps you find a loved one, or some other important use, I think people would have a much higher willingness to pay.