I watched the election coverage over the weekend. It seems the news media have taken to making bold statements and speculations on social media's -- specifically MySpace and Facebook's -- role in the increased turnout among young voters. There are few people who are bigger proponents of social media's potential than myself ("Social Media's Election Effect"). However, to simply assign a causal relationship between people's interactions within social media ("Social Networks And Politics - 'Snakes on a Plane' 2?") and people's actions in the real world without understanding or explaining is at best meaningless, and at worst irresponsible.

Am I the only one that thinks I've granted permission too much? Let me back up for a second. At least once weekly I get an email asking me to connect with someone in the business, a colleague, a recruiter, a salesperson -- you name it I get an invite. While they say it's good to be popular, give me a break already. How many "friends" or connections can one person truly have?

A colleague of mine who helped build one of the earliest proprietary online services wisely noted that one of the most significant and inevitable forces shaping the Web is sophistication. That's right -- no matter which new, promising service you consider, it's only a matter of time before its users mature, inherently changing the dynamic of the entire marketplace. Search advertising, the foundation of the online advertising economy, is no exception.

We've seen the online world change a lot over the past 15 years. We've seen several shifts in the key battlegrounds for control of the value generated by consumers' use of online services.

Online video is our little baby. At first she crawled, then she started walking and just recently she's getting into the running-around stage, where she's harder to control and learns really fast, sponging up everything that she possibly can! Soon our little baby will be a little adult and will have all the problems facing every other adult, or in this case every other mature industry!

Besides making Monday a miserable and unproductive work day, the Super Bowl is a great example of why no media buy can really ever be done in a vacuum. A few times during the big game, fans were prompted to visit MySpace.com to view and share the commercials they see during the game. The idea that is so intuitive, yet so hard to practice, is this: For today's brands to get the most out of their traditional media buys, they must have a plan to extend those campaigns into social media.

Once again I am disappointed by the Super Bowl ads. (Not to mention I am really let down that the Pats didn't win.) Is it me? Do I have false hopes? Years ago I remember the ads being entertainment. The sizzle was the steak.

The market is in dire need of a simple, intuitive Web service that combines contact databases, calendaring and living profiles. A service that spans all the major social networks, computing platforms, devices and access points. A service that enhances value by eliminating the need to toggle and sync through clunky patches and plugins. A service that gets to know me and then delights me! A service that doesn't become nuisance and make me unpopular by automatically spamming everyone else in my own multiple contact databases!

I spent some time this week at the AlwaysOn conference in New York City, which focuses on technology start-ups and venture capital with Silicon Valley lenses. The mood of the conference was very positive and upbeat, as you might expect given the strong tailwinds that this industry sector has had for the past couple of years. In spite of all of the optimism, one issue popped up several times in sessions related to the advertising marketplace or to the financing and mergers and acquisition environments: "What if there's an economic downturn?"

Over the last month I've stated more than once that I feel ad exchanges are increasing in their importance, so I felt this week I'd spend a little more time explaining just why I see them as useful