Social media is becoming just plain old media - and that's a loss

What has killed social media? Vanity:

At some point in the not so distant past, we knowledge (Web) workers decided to, collectively, kill one of the most profound and deep reaching components from all of these social networking tools out there: our very own conversations and, instead, we embarked on that frantic, unstoppable rush to become publishing machines blasting out marketing messages non stop that continue to be impregnated all over the place with our very own vanity.

Luis Suarez is worth listening to on this. He was one of the early people to completely transform his working life using social tools, and now he’s finding the potential he saw then destroyed:

This is where blogging and the original social networking tools differ tremendously from today’s world of media tools, more than anything else, because they have never been about you, but about the collective, the network, the community, in short, the conversations.

You can still find great conversations on social media – but it’s getting harder to find them.