Everywhere and nowhere is how The Economist puts it. I agree. The ever elusive earning model that capitalizes on the social aspects of your network may be about to get more complicated. If we we were to cross reference the information of your email in-box with that of your social graph, as the article suggests, we might infer what you're up to with greater accuracy.
The opening of social networks may now accelerate thanks to that older next big thing, web-mail. As a technology, mail has come to seem rather old-fashioned. But Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other firms are now discovering that they may already have the ideal infrastructure for social networking in the form of the address books, in-boxes and calendars of their users. “E-mail in the wider sense is the most important social network,” says David Ascher, who manages Thunderbird, a cutting-edge open-source e-mail application, for the Mozilla Foundation, which also oversees the popular Firefox web browser.
The money follows the relationships - the real, one-to-one or many, conversations that people exchange with each other. Remember Jerry Maguire?
Listen to the words, watch the body language. Congratulations, you get to keep all those names in the network. Those people, they are who makes it social. They may decide to use your product or service and recommend it to a friend. It still depends on whether the item and experience is worth talking about and sharing. Provide something of value and the network will invite you as part of the social. That simple.