JP makes a number of very good arguments in his post. Principal takeaway for me was the reaffirmation that when you are creating something entirely new, it’s futile to look for something that is being displaced as a measure of ROI.
As it relates to social networks, I made a couple of comments over email recently to a small group of like minded people about my growing disillusion with metadata content in social network feeds. Simply put, what the enduring value of watching the churn of things my friend network is doing as opposed to filtering out the things I suspect would be valuable based on my behavior in addition to my stated preferences. In retrospect this is the wrong point of view to take.
I am still working to reconcile my many conflicting views on social networks, but suffice to say, I am still an enthusiast albeit a “constructively skeptical” one.
We haven’t figured out a way to solve the problem of low knowledge worker productivity. [Sometimes, I get the feeling we spend more time trying to figure out how to measure knowledge worker productivity, rather than concentrate on raising productivity levels. We spend more time mutating benchmarks to our purposes, throwing away the opportunity to make quantum improvements as a result. In fact that’s my First Law of Benchmarks: If gains are so low that you need benchmarks to prove the existence of the gains, they’re probably not worth having in the first place.