The Sweet Spot for Userplane

"The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it." - Adam Smith

In my last post on Userplane, I categorized Userplane as an Application Service Provider (ASP) for community web-site communication software. In this post, I'm leveraging this classification to help identify the sweet spot for using Userplane. Userplane is a good choice for:

• Outsourcing communication functionally to an ASP,
• Capturing revenue from advertising,
• White-listing users to include only the site's user community.

Backing up a bit, John's blog has some background on the Userplane product offering. As usual, Wikipedia is a nice entry point for background information on ASP in general.

To me, the case for using an ASP boils down to specialization (and my leading quote for this post). Userplane's service transforms the cost and complexity of operating the communication software into an usage based expense. Another advantage I really like about the ASP model is that an APS has a much wider user base which effectively shares the fixed cost of development across the ASP's customer base (as opposed to just one web-site operator). This second advantage is also reflected in the scalability, robustness, and well developed infrastructure offered by an ASP.

Using an ASP has several other advantages which are covered nicely here (as well as important potential disadvantages). There are also security risks to consider.

There are couple of unique features of Userplane that are worth considering. One advantage is advertising revenue sharing via Userplane money that changes the expense of communication software into income for the web site operator.

The final advantage I noted comes up in the context of alternatives to Userplane. For instance, there are many alternatives for chat functionality such as integration with AOL's OpenAIM. The difference is that with Userplane, the users available for chat can be white-listed to include only the site's user base.