Why social software needs to be free to rock

Smi writes:

The Business Model I hate the most is probably this one: Freemium. Unfortunately it is not going to vanish, but I hope that more services actually charge their customers money for what they do.

I agree and yet I don’t.

The problem with premium services within social software is that social services require certain adoption rates to make them *really* rock, due to their social character. Del.icio.us is nice but it really rocks because so many people I know use it, too.

Any social software that is premium is usually limited in adoption. And it risks being overtaken quickly by a copy-cat competitor offering the same for free.