Social Networking For Entrepreneurs?

I've never been one for social networking in the past simply because of the ill-conceived notion that such activities were for the younger generation to fill the void of what would otherwise be real world relationships. It was only recently that I gradually embraced social networking, rather late for someone who loves to live on the cutting edge of technology, and am gradually discovering the advantages and disadvantages of such a networking medium. Sure, I was on Friendster many years back when it was cool to sign up and add friends but I've not touched that account for years.

Social networking is part of what is otherwise known as Web 2.0, the explosion of user generated content, a massive topic where long dissertations can be written about, whether be it about the intelligence of the masses or about the amount of crap out there, but I'll just focus my thoughts on the networking component for now. How effective is social networking for an entrepreneur?

After dabbling in Facebook and more recently, Linked In, for the past week or two, I can safely conclude that networking on Facebook will be of little value and may not be worth the time and effort in growing relationships if the sole purpose is only for the business. I am however a little hooked because the platform has enabled me to keep in touch with all the friends I had in the past. Without such a platform, it would have been impossible to track where everyone went or even to communicate with them.

I am pretty new to Linked In and will hold my reservations till later, but I've thus far been pretty impressed by the implementation of the service and the possibilities that it holds for businesses in the search for partners and employees.

Business owners explore new technologies to determine how these can be used to grow their businesses. The participation in social networking is not going to bring about any significant or even tangible benefits to a business in terms of sales or growth but the links can be useful in the search for a new employee with a good fit in the organization. The secret to business growth is not in the participation of web 2.0 services, but in the creation of tools to facilitate the grown of the community and their contributions, to facilitate web 2.0 - this is till we reach web 3.0 where we have a semantic web of machines that interact with each other intelligently and grow. Painful lessons learnt from my previous work on Hayek's theory of artificial intelligence evolution in an economy of agents may actually come in useful after all.