Writer, Agilist, Elder Geek
(Yes, I'm still analyzing Free, Freemium, et. al).
So as I've noted many times – and as can be noted elsewhere – giving things away for free builds trust and you can make money with Freemium. Building trust with free items is an old technique that sadly seems to need to keep being relearned by people.
Free as is rather obvious, is common now with free game demos, free comics, free online books, Freemium games, etc. We're awash in free things.
Technology allows us to deliver content and spectacular speeds to an audience of ready fans. We writers can get our eBooks out faster than anyone in publishing dreaded of a decade ago. Those of us in gaming can get out a game in parts, or keep the DLC flowing until a game's sequel comes out. Musicians can deliver one tune at a time until the DVD burns or concert season comes up.
We can keep delivering content all the time. There can be almost no gap between one product than the next – in the case of novels, with continual e-chapters, it never has to end.
I'm wondering if this is a good idea, or if at the very least it'll be hard to adapt to:
I used to have a tradition in my programming days, of going to the Interface Hall of Shame (now quite out of date http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/) to find out the latest things not to do. And yes, as you guessed, my programming days were quite awhile ago.
Anyway, to get away from my age to the subject, one of the things I learned as a programmer was that designing a good interface was not obvious. Most people designed interfaces with . . . well I'm not sure what they had in *mind* since thinking was not often part of the process. Let's just say I saw some bad stuff.