I haven't been over to Ryze recently, but I got a reminder today about various changes to the service, and serveral of them caught my wandering eye. [The actual descriptions are accessible if you have a Ryze account.]

We continue to see the various social networking services using visibility into the social network as a lever for membership. Here, Ryze has limited the basic membership to only two degrees of connections in the network; I don't recall what it was formerly, but clearly it was larger in scope. And Gold and Platinum members are granted the right to a specific number of 'distant' searches, where they are basically paying to play around in the amassed rolodexes of other members.

So we are seeing 'pay to play' clearly emerging from the murk. If a service -- like Ryze, or the other business oriented, open services -- can convince people that dropping in their personal networks into the system, and inviting your closest 250 friends makes sense for some reason, they can rig the rules so that the service can meter access to you and those people.

It's not that it's shady, since members theoretically know what they are getting into when they sign up (leaving aside the issue of changing the policies after the fact), but it starts to raise questions:

• People want to be networked and meet others with whom to do business, so it makes sense to be listed in the 'yellow pages' of the future, which is what these services seem to be tending toward. But if it is a 'yellow pages' model, shouldn't people pay to be listed?
  
• If it is, on the other hand, a telephone exchange model, certainly the ones making the call (making the search) should pay.
  
• If it is a dating service model, people want to get hooked up with people meeting their profiled interests and (theoretically) no one else, and therefore, the service should be managing things so that unwanted contact does not happen.

So, it looks like we are evolving some scary, blendo model of business, here. I am free to join, but I don't have the rights of the paying members who can (in some circumstances) see me when I can't see them. This inequality is troubling, but parallels other fee-for-rights movements, like paid travel lanes in public highways. But since, in principal, I want to be contacted in some circumstances this should be ok, right? Well, only so long as I am never spammed, and it seems likely that those paying for the paid memberships are more likely to be using the service to sell, sell, sell.

In the final analysis, I bet that pay-for-play won't work. Open social networking services, even those that are oriented toward business, will need to operate on a more egalitarian footing: where all members have basically the same rights and privileges, even if there is a fee for membership based on servcies rendered.

The money making model will have to come from corporate sponsors and advertisers of various sources, who want to have their banners flying behind the activities going on at various virtual 'plazas', watering holes, and chat rooms that are associated with specific communities or interest groups. For example, IBM might sponsor a number of virtual setting that attract people interested in open source, or Sony could sponsor areas related to consumer electronics people.

We are in one of those periods of evolution where weird and untimatedly unviable lifeforms are being generated in a wild profusion of types, shapes, and sizes. But after a short period of time (geologically speaking) most of the strange-o, bizzarro types die off. The truth is, creating new and unusual business models isn't hard, especially in new territory like social networking, but making them work is.