You're brutal, but I see where you're coming from. Being funny requires a fair amount of edge, and I think it's hard for a corporation to take that chance. I thought Google did a great job with it in their "Complexity is Good" ad: I find the actual content of the ad misleading, but it's genuinely funny. Netezza's Data Liberators isn't bad either, at least now that they've made clear it is by Netezza.

But none of these hold a candle to viral campaigns aimed at mass consumer audiences. I don't see an enterprise software company coming out with a campaign like Burger King's Subservient Chicken--though wouldn't that have been great for an NLP company?

Bill, I'm with you. I have accounts on Facebook and even on FriendFeed, but I only use them to syndicate my posts to the social networking platforms I do use: my blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Not passing judgment either--just using what works for me. And I also made fun of Twitter for months before using it. I still do on occasion. :-)

Indeed, if Google should be worried about Twitter, the threat comes from Twitter's success at building community, not from Twitter;s access to better content or superior search functionality. Google already knows what you're thinking.

Social search is an interesting space. But Twitter has a ways to go before it before it truly enables social search. If you're interested in the space, keep an eye on startups like Aardvark and Hunch.

I think you and Mason a're saying almost the same thing in different ways.

Mason criticizes “Introducing yourself to as many random people as possible" because clearly such "networking" is meaningless. You (and Godin) emphasize that networking should be about real connection. The implication, at least in my view, is that you should reach out to people if and when you have a real basis for connecting--something that makes the two of you more than just a random pair of human being that happen to be in the same virtual gin joint at the same time.

Of course, you have something in common, by all means you should connect. Cultivating relationships with the people with whom you share interests is what real networking is all about. Indeed, people who take this approach build valuable social networks, while people who fill up their virtual dance cards with meaningless connections quickly find that their "network" doesn't actually do anything for them.

Lots more info on the Newssift blog: http://blog.newssift.com/

I'm not a big fan of Facebook, so I'm incline to think that status updates should go *to* Twitter, not from it. That said, I question all five of your supporting points:

1) Twitter is who I am. No masquerade: I use my real name, and so do all of the people I follow. Facebook is just a way for people to find me if they can't figure out how to find my email address.

2) If you're that concerned about your ex tracking what's going on in your life, then you shouldn't be posting about any of your life in public. If anything, Facebook is much more of a walled garden than Twitter, and its privacy controls are far more sophisticated than Twitter's--in my opinion too sophisticated for mere mortals.

3) Most posts on Twitter do not elicit a response--as with all social media, the majority of messages are ignored. Attention is scarce, and demand exceeds supply. I don't know how Twitter compares to Facebook in this respect.

4) My boss is on Twitter. Moreover, since Twitter isn't a walled garden like Facebook, my boss doesn't even have to be on Twitter to watch me there. I'm not sure where you get the idea that Twitter is more private than Facebook.

5) You can be a fake on Twitter, but the social norm is for users to be real people or real companies. And even corporate users often have real people representing them. I think you're confusing Twitter with Friendster.

In short, I agree with your conclusion that there's no need to update your Facebook status from Twitter, but not the steps that lead you to that conclusion. Are you just not into Twitter?

It's more like the legal and judicial system don't like the idea of jurors doing their own research or violating the confidentiality of the proceedings. Search engines and social networking are just the latest means to that end.

http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/03/17/law-vs-the-...

Bill, you might want to read (and perhaps address) the reactions to Forrester on this subject, most of which haven't exactly been positive. You can see a collection of such reactions on : Techmeme.

I have no doubt that people would volunteer to be mentors, but I don't think it's realistic to expect the quality of TechStars / YCombinator to scale. Maybe it doesn't have to. But I suspect that these start-ups-on-a-shoestring only work when both the entrepreneurs and the mentors are top-notch, and I'm skeptical that a government program (at least in the United States) would play well with this need. Just look at how the politicization of the public schools has made it so hard to improve their quality. I say let start-ups be start-ups and investors be investors.

Thanks for sharing! You note that Shirky doesn't call out the need for search tools to bring order to the chaos of informally generated content. Did anything interesting on the subject come up in the Q&A or discussion? Seems like a natural question to ask at an enterprise search event!

Also, I'd love to see research documenting the productivity gains associated with enterprise tagging tools like IBM's DogEar--as opposed to ethnographic studies simply describing their use. Everyone tries to generalize from the success of Wikipedia, but no one ever seems to offer another example with hard data to back it up, particularly within the enterprise. What I have heard anecdotally suggests that social tagging in the enterprise has mixed results. That's why my own team has focused on developing tools that bootstrap on minimal investment to maximize ROI.