Image via FriendFeed

Bret Taylor of FriendFeed broke the news today that the social aggregator service has been purchased by none other than Facebook. In the short term, things will remain the same as they've always been. But Bret's post on the company blog suggests that plans are already afoot to integrate FriendFeed into the current black hole of social networking.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

What's missing from the social web? The ability to just hang out and throw back a few. Really. The missing element from the new, social media driven internet is quite ironically the ability to socialize with people directly, rather than mediated through various services online. And why is this important? Because no matter how much we can expand our social lives online, what matters most is our social lives offline.

Image via CrunchBase

If you're involved in social networking and you've not heard about the Ashton Kutcher/CNN showdown, you should probably check yourself for a pulse. In a nutshell, Kutcher has promised to prank Ted Turner if his Twitter account, @aplusk, makes it to 1 million followers before @cnnbrk (which, prior to this week, wasn't even owned by CNN). Even with the stuff Kutcher is promising if he wins, this is still rank stupidity.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

When is social media no longer social? When you're playing it for the numbers. It seems the great promises of social media have fallen by the wayside, as users play a game of one-upmanship with each other, trying to have the most followers, tweets, comments, what-have-you. You know what? That's not social media. That's asocial media.

I don't know if Scoble will beat me to the punch (he's blogging this too) but I got to say this: You don't need hashtags any more. The reason? Real-time search and filtering exists and works well in the places where hashtags are primarily used. If you don't get it, dwell on that for a bit. Once it sinks in, you'll know.

Image via CrunchBase

We all know that Twitter has jumped the shark. The recent additions of the suggested users list, the influx of celebrity and brand accounts (and all the silent, creepy stalker accounts that follow them), and the incredible gaming of the friend/follower system demonstrates that quite clearly. But that's not why I say it's time to take our tweets and go elsewhere.

Image by Raymond Yee via Flickr

Where are the business plans for social networking & social media ventures? Do any exist? Really? Because I keep hearing how they're needed, but never any evidence that they exist.

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I've been taken to task for my post earlier this week about tweet protection being meaningless. It turns out that the person whose tweets lead to the article toggles protection on and off, and apparently quite frequently. But that begs the question: If you're turning protection on and off, why bother having it on in the first place? And if you just straight-up have it on, why are you bothering with Twitter in the first place?

Image via CrunchBase

Ever wish that Twitter was a good platform for conversations, rather than simply being a way to push announcements at people? Have I got a site for you! Blellow is a new microblogging site, currently in beta, that does it better than Twitter. While the beta is still missing a few useful features, what it does have already shows that the people behind Blellow have a better way to communicate via microblogging.

Image by Robert Scoble via FriendFeed

Facebook is bringing out some major changes to their service in the next week. One of the most visible changes will be its new website design, despite only having the current one for about nine months. And with this new design, their ripping-off of lifestream aggregator FriendFeed seems to be complete.