The stream

"Controlling the stream" is not just one of the major life-challenges facing elderly gentlemen; it is the center of industrial competition on the realtime social network that we once termed "Web 2.0." Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, gave a speech yesterday before a group of advertising executives in New York in which she argued, as the Wall Street Journal reported, that "banner and text ads are old news." Today, "the new tactic is to blur the lines between marketing and social networking" by introducing commercial messages into "the stream" of realtime status updates exchanged among friends. Intimacy, whether real... http://ping.fm/tiqd8