This is several emails stitched together so doesn't flow as well as it should. But I think it needed publishing.

At the height of the B2B period I did quite a lot of work on understanding conversations in terms of one-few-many to one-few-many so traditional publishing is one-to-many; most plain email is one-to-one; most blogs are one-to-few; mailing lists are few-to-few; and so on.

YASNs do answer some needs that are not currently provided elsewhere.

The key one is enabling initial one-to-one communication between people who don't know each other. The centralised system can provide a venue for this where the initial contact is at arms length and so "safe". Given that the this initial contact often leads quickly to traditional one-to-one methods like phones and email, it's only the initial contact that matters. It might be possible to de-centralise it but we'll have to do a lot more work on standard ways of anonymity, encryption and search. FOAF and Socialgrid deal with the search bit but assume that complete transparency is ok. It may be OK for geeks and self-publicists but it's not ok for everyone else.

The second one that Ryze, Tribes, Ecademy, Orkut, Yahoogroups, Meetup, and discussion boards answer is the need for few-to-few group communication. The Blog community is trying to bolt this onto a one-to- many system with comments and trackbacks and frankly it sucks. Trying to track and remain involved in group discussion that happens across multiple comments threads on multiple blogs really doesn't work very well. phpBB, Mailman and hosted sites like quicktopics or communityzero have dropped the barrier to entry and Yahoogroups has dropped it to zero as long as you can put up with the ads. For the YASNs that provide this feature it's been quite successful but it's quite hard to understand why when the implementations aren't very good compared with the dedicated systems. Also this area could really do with a good dedicated search engine.

The effects on monetizing YASNs

So YASNs and YABNs (Yet Another Business Network!) do fulfil some fairly basic needs in people. We're still on the first generation so most of them (including our own Ecademy) are fairly clunky. As I said above, These needs seem to revolve around three areas:-
- Personal Publishing: one to many communication
- Group Discussion: few to few communication
- Meeting people we don't know: one to one communication in a safe environment

If these needs are real and the YASNs are a real answer to them, then we'll find a way of monetizing it. If we go back a few years this is the same question as asking "How should eGroups/Hotmail make money?". The answer in that case was Yahoo!/Microsoft. And there's hundreds of answers only one of which is to take a skim on transactions. Here's a few.

- Advertising: VC poured scorn on this and continues to do so. And yet Google/Overture have made it work. If you can keep your costs down and sell the advertising cleverly, there's a nice little earner available. Eyeballs *are* worth money. Just not as much as we thought.

- Subscriptions for premium services: The churn may kill you but it does work. At least until the same offer is free elsewhere. Similarly for paid listings.

- Auctioning/selling associated product to corporates: The classic is Meetup selling aggregated customer attendance to venues.

My guess is that the current crop of heavily VC supported YASNs will flame out when they burn all their cash and then either disappear or be absorbed. Mainly because I don't think they can generate as much money as is needed to service the VC they've taken. In the shake out, maybe Barry Diller will buy them all for cents on the dollar. Or a big portal will spend silly money instead of writing and building their own. Which means we'll end up with a couple of large competitors where money is not an issue and a group of niche sites that are self sufficient but remain quite small.

The Decentralizing YASNs postscript.
There is another possibility. Someone will work out how to decentralise all the YASN function into a Movable Type style, free, open source project and there'll be a few million YASNs instead of 100. It might even be nothing more than a plugin for Movable Type/Typepad. This wouldn't kill the existing hosted services but it would reduce their ability to monetize significantly.

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