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?

As a follow-up to last week's post, here are ten things I dislike about social media, in no particular order.

One of the hardest jobs I ever had was working as a day camp counselor, spending eight summers straight at Beth El Summer Session in New Rochelle, NY. While it's been a few years since I wore a T-shirt and swimsuit to work every day, seeing all the kids home from camp swarming around Madison Square Park this week brought back a few memories. It also made me realize how relevant a lot of what I learned in that job is to what I'm doing now.

As summertime is a period of reflection, in between applications of sunscreen and dips in the pool, thought I'd spend the next two columns pondering the good and the bad of social media, starting with the good part.

Cue the movie trailer voice: You thought it was just a social network. Little did you know it would go on a murderous rampage, killing everything in sight. You can run, but you can't hide because Facebook's coming after your friends -- and then it's coming after you. That's the kind of image that comes from a number of news headlines over the past week.

And we thought that Facebook loading up its stream of status updates a few months ago was a sign of its desire to go head-to-head with Twitter. Little did we know. In this week's edition of my Social Media Insider column, we'll dissect the myriad headlines that Facebook has been pumping out over the last few days, and how they relate to Twitter.

If you're an advertiser or you represent one, you may have tried targeting consumers based on when they were born and their chromosomal makeup (demographic), where they live or happen to be at the moment (geographic), what they're viewing on a Web page (contextual), what other Web sites they've visited (behavioral), or what keywords they're entering in a query box (search engine marketing). Yet now it's possible to target consumers based on their associations with each other.