I am all about the free stuff on the internet – especially in terms of online video and other tools considered to be in the sphere called “Social Media”. I’ve got free accounts all over the place. Ustream, youtube, flickr, etc. If I don’t have it and it is cool I’ll get an account in 30 seconds. Call me a sucker and I’ll agree with you – I am a sucker for anything free. And you should be too.

But heed my warning of the free model apocalypse: Free is awesome, but free dies

For the longest time I have been preaching that as cool as all of these free tools are, don’t bet your farm on them. Paid twitter accounts are coming ( I said it a long time ago ). YouTube is turning off the faucet to their free API. And you are going to see more and more of this in future. If a company provides a strictly free service online they will eventually crash and burn.

It all eventually comes down to being in business, and part of being in business is making money. Period. Oh you might find some situations where someone has a loss leader, or they can funnel cash from a serious venture into the fun free one. But if all they have is free – make sure you can live if they up and disappear one day. Consider pumping money into a business than runs on the Freemium model – get a paid account and support some of the kick ass work that the company did to build such a cool service.

Make sure you have a mental note as to what to do if something you use that is free disappears. Got video on YouTube? Make sure you have a local copy and you can jump over to Vimeo if needed (Yes also free). Ideally look into what it takes to eventually host your own video someday. Due this same risk management for anyplace where you get a good chunk of your free traffic. You know the old adages: Don’t take anything for granted, and don’t place all of your eggs in one basket.

Now go out there and mooch off of as much free stuff as you can get your hands on.