It's time to atone. Some may appreciate the timing, as it coincides with yesterday's observance of Yom Kippur, Judaism's Day of Atonement, the climax of a period of repentance. Everyone has some sins to atone for, including marketers and agencies trying to engage consumers through social media. Today, we'll confess.

Being out at Advertising Week events this week proved to me that I'm not the only one obsessed with the fact that a business model needs to be developed for media companies and advertisers to make real, bottom line-lifting hay out of random, lightning-in-a-bottle media phenomenon. Things like Susan Boyle, Kanye West's MTV diss and other events that are increasingly huge reach vehicles, but exponentially less predictable than big, annual media events like the Super Bowl. In fact, their power and their problem is that they aren't predictable at all.

Not all mobile applications are social, but those with social elements will keep pushing social media's boundaries forward.

Maybe I suffer from too much skepticism, but this social media headline from Ad Age certainly grabbed my attention: "Facebook Finds Profitability Despite Nascent Advertising Model." Drilling a little deeper this morning, I discovered that this information came straight from Mark Zuckerberg at the Facebook blog, who, in the second-to-last paragraph of a post yesterday, said, in a "BTW" kinda fashion: "Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I'm pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter."

Given how obsessed people are with social networks, especially younger consumers who use it to religiously keep in touch with their friends, it's hardly surprising that mobile social network usage is skyrocketing. So which networks are benefiting the most from the trend?

Given the heavy topics I've dealt with lately in this column, writing about VitaminWater's crowdsourcing of its next flavor on Facebook seems pretty prosaic. And yet, as one of my favorite topics -- and yours -- is the role of focus groups in a world where there is much richer data about consumers than ever before, it's worth pondering how successful crowdsourced products will be -- and what the role of crowdsourcing will be in marketing going forward.

I swore this would be a vacation. It was so weird taking a cab to JFK and not asking for a receipt, but I was ready to embrace it. Still, a long Labor Day weekend in Los Angeles for a friend's wedding wound up being shaped continually by social media experiences with brands big and small. Here are some standouts.

Excuse me for being a little behind, as it happens, the Times, but I just got back from Ireland to discover that that very newspaper has decided it's time to kill Facebook, just because -- from what I can tell -- it's good to be out in front of trends and be the first to the funeral .

Now that augmented reality has established itself as the technology buzzword of the year, what impact will it have on social media?