Thomas Hawk writes "One of the most interesting things to come out of Yahoo's earnings call with analysts yesterday was a statement by Yahoo's COO, Daniel L. Rosenweig on Yahoo's plans to 'monetize' their various social network properties. Flickr was mentioned five times on the conference call and their de.lic.io.us property was as well, after neither were mentioned in last quarter's call. Rosenweig characterized these services as being largely unmonetized and talked about leveraging these "assets" and targeting and profiling a large growing registered audience base. It will be interesting to see how some of Yahoo's popular web properties change through the monetization process."

GREAT! to me this means we are going to mess up your services and fill them with advertisements. I like them because they don't have ads. I don't want to be 'monetized' as an 'asset.' I want to share and connect with my friends. I want to live in community and share with others. I don't use any other Yahoo properties (because they are full of annoying adds) and really only use flickr and del.icio.us ones because I used them when they were independent. I pay for my flickr account. I will commit social network suicide if they mess them up. I bet you a lot of other people will to. We are getting to an age where we can build the open social network tool set based on open principles, open tagging. Then someone else can build tools to search across them and aggregate them. We don't need their silo's for our online lives.