Thoughts on "2011 The Year the Free Ride Died"

If a service doesn’t have a way for me to support it directly, and isn’t depending on my support, I’m going to be very wary of depending on it. -- From "2011 The Year the Free Ride Died" on ReadWriteCloud

The above post basically encapsulated what bothers me about services like Facebook and GMail, and others of their ilk. I typically abandon said services before the masses do (I deactivated Facebook about 2 years ago, though I hop on now only for Facebook chat). As a user/product of these services, the pains I have to deal with being a user begin to outweigh the utility I receive. Once Facebook streams became an infinite cesspool of Zygna game updates, people "Liking" commercial products and brands, and more and more cleverly positioned ads, it became clear to me that the site had no redeeming purpose that required my attention.

Is GMail going that route? Chance are it probably has - Google's revenue model is, like Facebook, centered around advertising. Google might not be directly letting 3rd parties see your emails, but there are context sensitive ads in the GMail UI, and lots and lots of data being collected about your email usage in your "profile". I, perhaps too optimistically, still trust Google to maintain their ability to not royally screw their users and completely sell off their private data, but the fact still exists that your Gmail usage still is someone else's product to buy.

With that said, the model of computing that we are starting to see (which started with mobile devices), where you have services you pay for, either as an app for by a recurring fee, that depend on a local install on your computer/device and access remote data ("in the cloud" if you wish), is going to be a better model. It fits what the author of "2011 The Year the Free Ride Died" espouses. You aren't the product in these scenarios - instead you are the real customer and are just a benefactor to the companies behinds these apps and service. You are now the ultimate and desired stream of income to the service and app provider

This is a better model. The third party isn't invisible, nebulous, and potentially nefarious. The third party simply does not exist.