Comment by Sandra McCartt on March 28, 2012 at 1:23pm

I think they are going to monetize it where ever it's possible, which is what anyone should do if they develop a versatile, successful tool or service. As a free service it is becoming saturated with spam marketing and clutter. The use of automated posting to all groups is turning a lot of them into rolling billboards so possibly some changes for automated posting services.

If we use it as a job board we will probably get to pay more for full functionality which will eliminate a lot of the problems caused by recruiters who have gone crazy building a database of connections.

Marketers who use it to sell everything from software to pet training and get rich working from home are probably going to get to pay for the ad space. So will start to disappear. I coma age a hobby group with 7k members. It takes five of us to keep the discussion board clear of marketing and job spam. I know a lot of the groups are having the same problem so I look for people who use the groups for automated posting to sell or promote to be dropped off of the site after they are blocked from some of the groups for repeated marketing.

People who actually use it reasonably for real networking will probably be allowed to continue to use the site as they always have but I think as people drop off if they are asked to pay for the service it will upgrade the quality of the site.

Perhaps more monitoring, rules and regs, which may be a good thing. I think it all depends on whether they price themselves out of the market or not.

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