I just saw Social Network last night (the Facebook story), and saw how blogging can be dangerous to your reputation. I had already figured that out. Yet I am on Facebook myself. I see it as a great way to communicate with your friends. You can have as few friends with whom you can share some more intimate details about yourself, or many (who cares about privacy anyway) so you can share less intimate details with the "whole world".
So why am I blogging? It seems that I been dragged into the world of social networks as a professional necessity. Yes, marketing is one of the last things that I think about. I need to understand how to relate all of these new communication tools into the website development that I do, if I want to be up to date and relevant.
I once blew a job interview with a firm in NYC because I said that I preferred to stick to industry standards, and then found out that they specialized in Facebook Markup Language (oops - should have done my research on the company). I am now seeing the facebook coding as becoming standardized (at least to the facebook app, and maybe a few others). Facebook is not so bleeding edge, and as a matter of fact, if you don't have facebook, twitter and blogging on your site, your website grade goes down (see http://websitegrader.com/).
Besides, maybe I actually have something worth while to say.
So I am going to add the social networking application coding techniques (as appropriate) to my toolkit.
Dave
