Short Blurb – The Trinity of Cheap and Social Web Utilities

Quick blog post as I continue to process a lot of things I thought about while I was away on vacation. These two things are unrelated but I have been thinking about them both quite a bit:

I have seen a lot of products in the social media space that bill themselves as utilities of some sort. I interact with a lot of utilities in the real world (power company, Comcast, etc) and they all have the same basic business model – an access fee and some form of consumption pricing. Why should utilities on the web be any different?

I played with two really cool netbook computers over the break and now I really want one. I think we are on the verge of seeing the “holy trinity of cheap” netbooks, cheap wireless access, and cheap (or free) software working together harmoniously a lot quicker than expected. I think this trinity of cheap is going to radically accelerate a lot of the trends we’ve been seeing, namely the mass adoption of web-based software.