Social Networking A large but long-in-the-tooth technology company hoping to become a bigger force in online advertising buys a small start-up in a sector that everybody agrees is the next big thing. A decade ago, this was Microsoft buying Hotmail--the firm that established web-based e-mail as a must-have service for internet users, and promised to drive up page views, and thus advertising inventory, on the software giant's websites. This month it was AOL, a struggling web portal (入口网站) that is part of Time Warner, an old-media giant, buying Bebo, a small but up-and-coming online social network, for $ 850m. Both deals, in their respective decades, illustrate a great paradox of the internet in that the premise underlying them is precisely half right and half wrong. The correct half is that a next big thing--web-mall then, social networking now--can indeed quickly become something that consumers expect from their favorite web portal. The non sequitur(推论，结论) is to assume that the new service will be a revenue-generating business in its own right. Web-mall has certainly not become a business. Admittedly, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL and other providers of web-mall accounts do place advertisements on their web-mail offerings, but this is small beer. They offer e-mail--and volumes of free archival (档案的) storage unimaginable a decade ago--because the service, including its associated address book, calendar, and other features, is cheap to deliver and keeps consumers engaged with their brands and websites, users more likely to visit affiliated pages where advertising is more effective. Social networking appears to be similar in this regard. The big internet and media companies have bid up the implicit valuations of MySpace, Facebook and others. But that does not mean there is a working revenue model. Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, recently admitted that Google's 'social networking inventory as a whole' was proving problematic and that the 'monetization work we were doing there didn't pan out as well as we had hoped'. Google has a contractual agreement with News Corp to place advertisements on its network, MySpace, and also owns its own network, Orkut. Clearly, Google is not money from either. Facebook, now allied to Microsoft, has fared worse. Its grand attempt to redefine the advertising industry by pioneering a new approach to social marketing, called Beacon, failed completely. Facebook's idea was to inform. a user's friends whenever he bought something at certain online retailers, by running a small announcement inside the friends' 'news feeds'. In theory, this was to become a new recommendation economy, an algorithmic (算术的) form. of word of mouth. In practice, users rebelled and privacy watchdogs cried foul. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, admitted in December that 'we simply did a bad job with this release' and apologized. So it is entirely conceivable that social networking, like web-mail, will never make oodles of money. That, however, in no way detracts from its enormous utility. Social networking has made explicit the connections between people, so that a thriving ecosystem of small programs can exploit this 'social graph' to enable friends to interact via s, greetings, video clips and so on. But should users really have to visit a specific website to do this sort of thing? 'We will look back to 2008 and think that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,' says Charlene IA at Forrester Research, a consultancy. Future social networks, she thinks, 'will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be'. No more logging on to Facebook just to see the 'news feed' of updates from your friends instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS reader or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show them to friends, since those with priv