Looking at the recent evolution of the web into the 2.0 trend you have to acknowledge the social nature of the new web, people interacting irregardless of location around the world in means and ways that we never would have thought of before – BUT, is there money to be made in this?

One of the bigger success stories for me personally must be Skype. The definitive killer app with up to 9 million people online simultaneously. Skype is free…

Considering that Skype is a technological driven solution you would have to think that if it wasn’t free that there would have been a free solution sooner or later (an innate quality of IT -> look at open source software) as it really isn’t rocket science. So is this the driving force behind the newly occurring products and solutions out there, and if so, where do these people get the money to support these free services?

So given the modern day dream of quickly starting up a few web based companies and moving to the rural countryside with nothing more that a decent laptop and an ADSL connection to get away from all the annoying traffic and general madness of the rat race do I have to wonder if it’s really that achievable.

Over and above the usual referral, affiliate, and click-based generated revenue so common place on the web today, is there another new model that can generate revenue purely on the internet alone based purely on the emerging social interaction between people? I guess if there was then everybody woul’ve been doing it by now?

So until that new frontier has been unveiled, is it safe to assume that if you don’t have something physical and concrete to sell that your dream of retiring to the end of the world connected only by a mere ADSL umbilical cord is still just that, a dream?