So, as we all know, there’s no money in running a social networking site, unless you act like a dick about it.

And at the back of my brain, there’s a little itch, that says that there has to be money in it, provided you don’t treat it as way to get hugely wealthy. Provided your concept of what it means to run a social networking site is simple to make a living, without acting like a dick.

So: straightforward questions:

What features would a social networking site have to have, in order to entice people to make it their primary social network?

Status updates, photo uploads/galleries, and events/invitations are basically my list. Have I missed anything?

The follow up, then becomes: how do we make that self sustaining?

Obvious: ad-supported through google ads, with an option to pay a (sub-10 dollar, ideally sub-5 dollar) yearly fee to remove ads.

Idle thought: would “free, and ad free in year 1, then ad supported or low yearly fee” work?

Obviously, the actual MVP component of a social site is people. So what is it that would get enough people to be using it to turn it into a (stable) revenue generating proposition?