But is there any real profit to be in social networks? I mean it's nice to have a basic 'conduit' to meet up with people online, but when I was a teenager, that was what IRC was for. For others it's Ventrilo or Steam Community. In the end, I see it as an application layer set atop the inherent power of the Internet, which is to connect random people with little effort (little effort in as much as without physical travel and what not for said random people), thus it doesn't give anything new in itself rather than a nicer 'wrapper' to access the same features of the Internet that have existed in one form or another. Be it USEnet, IRC, mailing lists, and what not.