I've been vetting plans to start monetizing Tabulas; server costs will quickly escalate and I need to address this problem before I run out of money.

The route I'm going is a combination of advertisements, targetted linking, and subscriptions.

The patron model will exist; I see no reason to change this. I think it's cheap enough ($28/year is really nothing) and creating a tiered system of support is beneficial to everybody. However, one of the hardest sells right now is why people should get a patron account. Besides the increased quotas, there really are no reasons to do so.

Patron accounts will soon serve as a springboard for more services - they'll be the required "membership" fee to take advantage of some of the more attractive offerings available to users. For example, one of the ideas I'm throwing around is a template store. The template store would allow designers to create templates which could be bought by patron accounts (or regular users). Purchasing a patron account would entitle you to $10 worth of templates on Tabulas. The store itself would have a revenues sharing model, where half the fees would go to Tabulas and the other half goes to the original designer. The benefit here is that it would give a strong financial incentive for designers to create templates to share, while offering a wide variety of attractive templates (one hopes) to the end users.

The new version of Tabulas also favors clouds - tagging of links, images and community feature will allow users to see a cloud of data among their friends. Complemented with the custom user groups... this is very powerful in sharing information with users. (For example, one of the features I've been working on is tagging on links, but I'm also taking it one more step by allowing you to create a hierarchy of your links, while maintaining the flatness of tags. Also, there are "special" tags that allow you to trigger certain actions. Tagging an item f:apunahasa would alert friend apunahasa that he should check this link out.).

I'm hoping if I can create a featureset that robustly handles the information overload from clouds, I can create subcommunities for families; imagine if you could pay once a year and get your whole family photo sharing, blogging, link sharing, etc! Organizations work would work as well, but I'm more interested in catering to the personal side of things; 6A pretty much has a stranglehold on the lucrative enterprise blogging model (plus, remote hosted enterprise services never work for privacy reasons).

I'm going to raise some of the existing friends limits and get rid of community restrictions altogether. I want to make communities a more powerful feature, along the level of Livejournal's communities. Once communities become a node for a specific interest, targetted Adsense advertisements will be placed on the community pages. Part of the reason why Adsense failed on Tabulas is that each journal individually is too diverse or personal for Adsense to be effective - my clickthru ratios were atrocious. By offering advertisement on specific interests, I hope to improve CTR and hopefully generate some side revenue.

The third thing I will be doing is integrating Amazon's webservices more closely to Tabulas. Your "listening to" and "currently reading" can be linked to the Amazon listing - the links will be referral links for Tabulas, so if people buy something after clicking that link ... that's a small bit of change for Tabulas.

The biggest change (and the most controversial I'd imagine) will be offloading some of the "non-important" features as third party plugins. The problem, specifically, with hit logging is that it is (a) an incomplete feature (it sucks) (b) it is WAY server intensive and (c) I don't like hit logging eating up Tabulas' main resources.

What I'm going to do is resurrect Tabulets - I will develop third party applications (that will work on other sites as well) but offer easy integration with Tabulas at a one-time fee. For example, if you were a patron account, I'd offer a really awesome version of the current hit tracking (it'd be sexy and have more accurate data) at a one-time fee of $X dollars. The hook is that you have to maintain a patron status. The one-time fee allows me to offset development costs while giving people an incentive to maintain an active subscription to Tabulas.

In a sense, I am trashing the crappier free feature and offering a higher-quality paid version. I have an idea of how the new feature will look, and I'm counting on the fact that people are willing to pay for quality - I want to differentiate Tabulas from "commodity" blogging sites like Blogger by offering quality value-added services (another example might be a one-time fee of $5 for adding the cool lightbox effect.

The initial fee is low, but when I can aggregate the masses, it really can help me in offsetting development. Hell, if I can get a consistent revenue stream, I may even be able to hire somebody to work on some features part-time (and there's a whole list of stuff I have in mind for that).

This whole plan is contingent on me creating a kick-ass 3.0 product (obviously). But I'm confident the new version is going to be LOADS better and will be generally adopted very positively.