Social networking doomed
ACADEMICS have finally found a way to kill off social networking.
Since the social notworking craze took off, scientists, technologists and kill-joys have united in condemnation of this silly sideline. But they’ve had little success so far.
Now an antidote seems possible, and a deluge of killer books, round tables and deathly corporate white papers threatens to analyse the life out of this social phenomenon.
Yesterday Managed Objects and Forrester Research hosted a round table in London on how web 2.0 was going to change the world, by making corporations more agile. The INQ could not be there, but we're pretty sure the talk would all have been about the new generation of meshy nibblers of information, who graze on data packets while permanently on the move. Proctor and Gamble would have been mentioned, as would American Airlines' invention of flexible pricing.
Sit through two hours of that, with a plate of food in front of you that you can't touch, and you'll never want to look at MySpace again.
But social networking is getting a double whammy. The second fatal hit comes from the publishing industry, as books like Crowdsourcing start to hit the shelves. A surfeit of titles will hit Amazon soon. All will hint at sensational revelations that fail to materialise, even if you're one of the few that makes it through 300 pages.
If that doesn't kill all creative instincts, nothing will. By this time next year, could social networking be dead?
Besides being boring, these business books never practice what they preach. If collaboration is so great, why are these books authored by a loner? And if people really want their information in engaging chunks, why publish an 80,000 word lecture, with no pictures.
Shouldn't a real book on collaboration read like this?
AndyM: Does anyone use web 2.0 for work?
BillG: LOL!
RupertM: PMSL
LarryEll: Fur Cough,
ScottMac: Git outta here, punk
AndyM: But what about Mash Ups, agile corporations and the
wisdom of crowds?
BillG: Hello, security. Can you get this guy outta my
Facebook? µ
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I agree with amIstupid - this article was terribly written. There was even some pretty junior spelling mistakes in there - I don't believe I have heard of a 'Proctor & Gamble' before.

The Inquirer can do better than this!
I mean I think I missed the point of the article. I consider myself at least a half wit, if not closer to a three-quarter wit. I somehow failed to get the jest of what this article was describing. Would someone mind summerizing this article with a little less of "beat around the bush" and a little more of "get to the point" please.
Nick seems to be saying that the very fact that books are going to be written for the purpose of getting business to use Web 2.0 technologies (i.e Facebook, Wikipedia) will be the end of the whole fad.

He points out (quite correctly IMHO) that the books will be long, cumbersome and written by one person. Totally at odds to the some of the underlying philosophy behind web 2.0 technologies (collaboration, easy access to information, mass appeal etc)

Nick also gives a down right terrible example of collaboration featuring:
BillG (Bill Gates - Microsoft + Facebook)
RupertM (Rupert Murdoch - News International + Myspace)
LarryEll (Larry Ellison - Oracle)
ScotMac (Scott McNealy - Sun Microsystems)
Seems a reasonable argument to me -- if you've got to publish (hard cover) books to push new technologies designed to go beyond standard publishing then you've kind of failed. The whole thing about punditry is getting to be a bad joke, anyway. We see this in the US with the talking heads on TV -- lots of air time, nothing to say that's relevant so they just mooch on whatever looks like it will sell.

Marketing people are a curse. Good ones are worth their weight in gold but they're rare as hens' teeth. The pack are a useless bunch of freeloaders who use up tons of resources telling everyone the bleedin' obvious and how valuable they are. (First product a typical marketing type sells is themselves.) We don't do transportation any more, do we?
I was speaking with Jeff Howe (author of "crowdsourcing" - the book) on crowdsourcing at a conference last week. And Jeff walks the crowdsourcing talk

1) Using crowdsourcing to source the cover of the book(go to coversourcing.co.uk),
2) Using crowdsourcing to source "readers" (people who red and comment on early drafts) - (RSS feed of chapter work-in-progress inviting comments).
3) Using crowdsourcing to source content - from assignment zero http://zero.newassignment.net/

Social networking may be doomed, but crowdsourcing is not social networking - it's outsourcing tasks with an open-call request. It works and it makes money (see www.clickadvisor.com for examples).