FIXZR

Is there a business model in offering servers for free*? Is there a business model in offering servers with additional pre-packaged software routines for free**? To make money what sort of rights would you need to the data you are hosting ***?

* Free servers, at least for low traffic sites, may be available in the form of Google’s App Engine. Amazon clearly charges for EC2 and Microsoft’s Azure will not be free either. For now at least, with the exception of Google’s price promotions, no one is queueing up to give away ‘raw’ server capacity.

** Twitter and Flickr have great API’s. You don’t in fact really need to visit the sites at all to get great value from their servers. In return they have your email address, and (somewhat inconveniently) a commitment not to use it to SPAM you.

*** If you’re offering servers for free, or higher level services via API for free, you’ve lost the chance to shout directly at your customer’s customer. So you need to use your insight into the data you are hosting to help others shout (the right thing) at their customer.

Twitter knows what links you are browsing and can use this to profile you (ala Phorm) and set itself up as a sort of DoubleClick/Google AdSense helping sites serve the right ads with the highest probable click-through rates.

Facebook, by spreading FaceBook Connect far and wide could perform the same trick, diminishing the need for / dependence on Ads on it’s own platform (they haven’t got any on their Mobile App already, and with more API’s opening up you may increasing consume Facebook, like Twitter, via clients instead of their portal).

I’d love to know the average server bill for a Facebook, Twitter or Flickr user (if you know or have a decent guess please comment below). A business model that is not based on advertising, but helping others advertise, seems to push the bubble thinking to even greater lengths!