Wanna be a millionaire through social networking?

There's a new service called Yuwie.
It's aim is to compete with Facebook and MySpace. You may say that
space is full, but it's not.  The reason is that Yuwie pays the social
networkers to network. 

Unlike Facebook and MySpace therefore,
who make around $8 million and $25 million a month in advertising
respectively, Yuwie makes money through advertising and then pays some
of it back to the social networkers who can make a mint themselves.

Therefore, unlike Adonomics
where Facebook applications such as Slide, Rock you and iLike are
valued at millions for being add-ins, Yuwie takes a percentage of all
this advertising and add-ins so that every time a networker clicks upon
you, you get something back.

The way they pay you is through
referrals.  Each referral you make and those that they refer accrues to
your account at 5 cents per 1,000 page views: the number of times you
and your referred friend's pages are viewed.  This means that you are
incentivised to blog, add, talk, update and communicate as often as
possible.

They've kinda merged PayPal and Facebook therefore.  PayPal works virallly on the basis of people always
open a PayPal account when they get an email saying, "You've got
money".  Combine that viral effect with a Facebook style website, and
you may be onto a winner.

However, with adverts all over the
site and five new 'friends' inviting me to linkup in my first hour of
Yuwie registration, I'm not sure it'll work.  After all, a bunch of
strangers all saying "hey, look at me, read my blog, over here" will
make a few of us switch off.  Although you can overcome that by
changing your Yuwie privacy settings to 'only friends' can connect and
view your profile.

Nevertheless, Facebook are obviously worried about Yuwie.
For example, as I tried to post about it in my Facebook blog, guess
what?  Facebook stopped me by prohibiting the link to the Yuwie website.

Maybe that's why some folks despise Facebook.
Equally, with 60 million people shouting at me in Facebook, almost 200
million in MySpace and millions of others in Bebo, Badoo, Flickr,
Twitter, Vodpod, Dopplr and more, I'm not listening anymore. 

That
is not to say I'm discounting the relevance or importance of social
media, social networking or virtual worlds.  I'm just trying to ensure
that the stuff I pick on and use fits my way of life, and not someone
else's.

Equally, I'm also looking for future ways of making
millions which will come from investing, not from page views.  That is
why JP Rangaswami points out in his excellent blog Confused of Calcutta:
"Think why Goldman Sachs has a very high percentage of employees using
Facebook. Goldman Sachs, wasting time? You better believe it. And
making money while they do it."