Jon Lebkowsky writes about an article in the latest issue of Business Week talking about “Generation @”. If those who came of age in a world where everyone has an at sign in their email addresses are called Generation @, then I wonder if I should refer to myself as part of “Generation !”. After all, my first networked email address was on Usenet using an exclamation point to separate the userid from the hostnames.

Jon talks about how many conversations he’s been in with other consultants and online entrepreneurs who've predicted the imminent death of social network platforms. I’ve participated in many such conversations as well, and I suspect that my conversations on the subject have significantly overlapped with Jon’s conversations.

Jon goes on to say, “There's just no business model, the smart people say. I myself have suggested that social networks lack real juice unless they focus on some object (or obsession), like Flickr with photos.”

Yeah, that’s pretty much been my line as well. However, this comes up in an interesting context for me. Nile from Colin’s class brings up Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam.

One of the things that people like about shopping is the social aspect of it. While we can IM our friends, or play with them in MMORPGs, and have blog based political arguments, we are shopping online alone. Perhaps someone will come up with a shared web browser with built in IM, voice, etc., so that a bunch of people can go online shopping together. They could see the same webpages and chat and IM about them. They could listen to audio clips and talk about what they like and don’t like. They could fight over which store they want to go to or click on next.