There is a great article in Slate today, A Radical Business Plan for Facebook, in which Farhad Manjoo suggests the seemingly absurd idea of Facebook actually charging users for social networking privileges. Manjoo cites developer David Heinemeier Hansson for reasoning:

"We've found out that having a price is really cool for making profits," Hansson pointed out last spring in an entertaining presentation called "The Secret to Making Money Online." "You have customers, they pay you money for the product or service, and you get profits! It's almost too simple to work."

Indeed! In fact, Hansson also reveals, "I've heard that over time—hundreds of years actually—this has been how most businesses have made their money."

So Manjoo lays out a simple proposition for squeezing a few nickels out of the 100 million Facebookers, a company that according to its founder Mark Zuckerberg is still looking for a business model.

Judging from some of the folks in my social network, a sizable minority of Facebook users have hundreds of "friends" and check in to the site multiple times a day—call them superactive users. Let's imagine that Facebook became a tiered service. A free plan would limit you to 200 friends, one status update per day, or some other non-Draconian combination of restrictions. But for $5 a month, the limits would be lifted. Certainly, many users would balk; tens of thousands would join Facebook groups to protest the new pay model. Let's assume that 95 percent of users will refuse to pay a dime. That still leaves 5 percent, or 5 million people, to pay $60 a year. That's $300 million in the bank.

$300 million is nothing to sneeze at, but judging by Microsoft's $240 million Facebook investment, Facebook is valued at about $15 billion. So Facebook may earn its full potential in 50 years. I hope Facebook's investors aren't holding their breath.

No doubt Facebook’s value is in the 100 million active users. However, does a massively popular site like Facebook, or Twitter (another Web 2.0 favorite lacking a business plan), lose its geek-chic and credibility when it places financial considerations anywhere near user considerations (see Facebook's ill-fated Beacon rollout or Napster’s attempt to go legit)?

Twitter certainly seems to agree with that thought, though there are rumblings of a Twitter business plan in the works. In an interview with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington last July, Twitter cofounder Evan Willaims claimed, "We’ve thought about it. We had to do some thinking about that to raise a bunch of money, but it’s not actively in development right now."

To bring it all back to the title of this post, I quote a piece by Simon Dumenco of Advertising Age:

What if not everything that flits across our screens -- computer or cellphone or whatever -- can be contorted into serving as a profit center? As I've said before: I don't think every tweet or blurp or bloop or fart that emanates from a human can or should have ads sold against it or be otherwise monetized.