Bloggers, pundits and even respected institutions like the Wall Street Journal seem to be obsessed with this year’s (and last year’s) buzzword, social networks. If last year it was all MySpace-this and Facebook-that, now we’ve got all "Social Networks Are Dead" and "Even Bill Gates Closed His Facebook Account". This last article notes that people spend 14% less time on Facebook per day than they used to.

To some, this signals death. To me, it’s maturity.

There’s no real reason to spend an hour in Facebook every day. Yes, the lure of silly applications and endless quizzes fades after a while, but that just means you start using it for its actual, intended purpose – social networking. You use it to get a constant stream of information about your friends, closer and more distant, to keep them in your lower tiers of consciousness. You use it to reestablish old ties that got lost along the way. You use it to check out people you’ve met or want to interview. You use it, in short, as a social network.

Now that the excitement has settled down a bit, it’s time for it to be useful.