Social Networking - still a business ?

This question crossed to my mind as I was reading Larry Dignan in ZDnet.

Larry says “The future of social networking [SN] is coming into focus and it looks like Facebook-ish features will be increasingly be integrated into your everyday applications”. He cites Yahoo and Google integrating SN features into their email apps, Oracle’s attempt to stick it into their Fusion App and those of some other enterprise applications as well.

Then he reflects a bit before concluding - increasingly, SN is looking like a feature more than a business. Facebook may still be around just as Google does in the search scene, but for many lesser SN sites, it could well be an unsung existence or eventual fold up.

John Murrel of Mecury News puts it best – “now it's practically a given that your time online is social time. Between commercial and peer pressure, you're expected to maintain both a public presence for general interaction and a semi-private sphere for friends and family, both updated in real time with your activities, opinions, latest interests, location, and cultural tastes. The vehicles for this presence were homepages at first, then blogs, and now the widget-laden profiles on the SN sites, along with an endless flow of pinging, poking and tweeting. It's sort of funny that a system built by notoriously socially awkward geeks has turned into a mammoth, never-ending cocktail party. But that's where we are, and right now, billions are being bet on monetizing the world of constant acquaintanceship”.

Pretty close !