• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, February 11, 2009

The Wall Street Journal and Fox Broadcasting are "fundamentally out of business," and Facebook as a platform will eventually rival today's Internet in both scale and breadth. Those were just two of the bolder statements thrown around at SocComm: The Social Communications Summit in New York on Tuesday.

It was Gary Vaynerchuk, founder and host of the popular video blog Wine Library TV, who predicted the untimely death for Rupert Murdoch's prized media assets. Why?

"The gatekeepers are dead ... platforms are dead," Vaynerchuk said. "Content providers are going to fundamentally win."

In less than three years, with no help from entrenched industry gatekeepers, Vaynerchuk has built an audience of roughly 80,000 viewers for his daily podcasts. Still, despite his unique success, official (and unofficial) gatekeepers in attendance were quick to challenge Vaynerchuk's assumptions.

"TV is still pretty profitable, and not dead by a long shot," said Kenny Miller, EVP of MTV Networks Global Digital Media group--who, for the record, said he sees neither himself or MTV as a "gatekeeper."

"The idea that every content creator is going to go out there and fund their own show, I think, is unrealistic," Miller added.

Even Steven Greenberg--who left his post as president of Columbia Records in 2007 to head up the Web-centric music label S-Curve Records--made the case for traditional talent management and media models.

"Some violinists are really great, but they are horrible entrepreneurs," said Greenberg. What's more, "Columbia and others are still content owners," he said. "There is still room for collaboration."

Along those same lines, Greenberg predicts that YouTube--along with video, a popular source for music among consumers--will eventually split ad revenue with record labels. "The (content) owners will be getting a half-penny per stream," he said.

But who predicted that Facebook will someday rival the scale and breadth of today's World Wide Web? David Kirkpatrick, senior editor of Fortune, who added that Facebook's present position at the head of all social media is not up for debate. "Facebook absolutely dominates social media right now," he said.

Estimating that Facebook now has nearly 175 million active users--up from just 65 million in May--Kirkpatrick offered multiple reasons for the network's success. Its creators are obsessed with great products and insist on changing the network's structure to facilitate continued growth. Also critical has been Facebook's insistence that members interact using their real identities, which, according to Kirkpatrick, has made for a more ethical--and thus less hostile--community environment.

There is also the matter of good timing and plain luck. For example: "Starting at Harvard was an amazing piece of luck," said Kirkpatrick, because it lent a certain cachet to the brand.

According to Kirkpatrick, two key challenges stand in between Facebook and total world dominance: Google--along with lesser-known social rivals--and the matter of member privacy.

"Facebook has a serious privacy issue that could get out of hand," he said with regard to a member's inability to effectively control the use of their image, behavior, and identity throughout the network.