Cringely on the imminent death of social networking

In Bob Cringely’s recent blog posting, “Social Networking is Just Another CB Radio,” he describes why he believes social websites are destined to crash and burn. His basic argument: there’s no business model, or at least not a very good one. If you have loads of traffic, you have a business model – advertising or acquisition. If you don’t have loads of traffic, your site will fail. Most social sites don’t have loads of traffic, because all the surf time is sucked up by the giants such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, so they fail.