Just read an interesting post on “How to Monetize Social Networks” talking about how Facebook and MySpace are striving to go beyond Google ads. It mentions the reluctance of members to accept too obvious publicity.

I think that to a considerable extent, that reluctance or willingness is linked to the benefits delivered to the members of the network. Which, on the other hand, would be linked to the networks long term survival-chances anyway.

I have just spent half a Sunday migrating umpteen items from our to-do and wish list in Google Spreadsheets to Toby’s Trac system.

I guess it will turn out useful, making it easier to manage the workflow and to trac back on past actions. But it was pretty mind numbing just sitting there rewriting all the entries and dropping down all those menus. And of course, Toby had created categories with a techy slant. There was no category for commercial, for example.

But, in all honesty, I have to give it to him that Trac seems to be really great. I guess that even UI Jane can live with the interface. And it’s free. Nevertheless, it would have been better if Toby dear had gotten around to implement it from the start.

It’s pretty cool really. We run this project almost entirely online and with open source stuff; Trac, Google Documents and Spreadsheets, Google Groups, Google Analytics and finally Google Adsense. I just have some problem getting the Google Apps going. I wonder if we could do the plan in Google Calendar. And that’s only the stuff that I know the names of. The rest of the team could probably add another half-a dozen open source thingies we use.