Once upon a time there was a dream called Diaspora:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)

The idea was that the social functions provided by Facebook, Linkedin, Myspace, etc. weren't really something that needed to be monetized… and considering how ubiquitous they'd become, giving users control over their privacy was a hot-button issue. D* was one of the original crowd-funded projects: a small team of students promised that they'd create a software platform that would allow you to run your social network on your hardware where you had absolute control over it.

Unfortunately, most of the public saw Facebook but with Wikipedia's charter. D* was trying to be more like Red Hat Linux - give something away that needed to be run by IT personnel who would pay them for support. So when all of its impassioned backers started saying "where's my Facebook without Facebook?" the D* team sort of freaked out and hid. One of them committed suicide.

When D* finally came out, it looked remarkably like G+ (in no small part because Google admittedly lifted everything good about their interface and came out with it first). It had even fewer adoptees, though, and with no giant Youtube audience to force into adoption, it trickled to nothing.

The idea remains sound - there's no reason a social media platform needs to be monetized, it just needs to cover its expenses. It could be argued that a social network is every bit the public utility that telephones are. It's 2014 - if you want to find a business, are you going to whip out a phone book? Or are you going to go to Yelp?

I honestly expect this is the way things are going to go. It used to be that Google's business model was to enter new markets and suck the profit out of them. That's now every internet giant's business model, from Amazon to Zynga. We're rapidly pointing towards Facebook Connect being the de-facto login of the internet… which means we're dancing on the ragged edge of anti-trust. Which, while few people remember, was pretty much where Internet Explorer lost its edge.

I'll take this opportunity to recommend Ryan Holiday's book. He makes a compelling argument that the Internet today is in the exact same place Yellow Journalism was before the New York Times invented subscriptions and started making news trustworthy, reliable and informative. We just happen to be living through the dark ages of media. As the model is based on trust and that trust has been irrevocably broken, something's gotta give, it's just a matter of time.