yelvington.com

The other day, when commenting on the MinnPost.com announcement, I said "we may be heading for a world in which nothing is dominant."

Now comes a bit of research from the management-consulting firm McKinsey & Company that demonstrates what I meant. The charts are hard to read, but here's the nut graf: "The research — an online survey of 2,100 consumers in the United States — found that the respondents divide their time among as many as 16 news brands a week. 'Brand promiscuity,' it appears, is the norm. Such findings have implications for media companies as they refine their products and strategies."

Brands just aren't what they used to be. A brand used to be something that stood the test of time. Now a brand is still powerful in terms of defining what a product is all about, but when it comes to loyalty, fuggetaboutit. Brands today are volatile.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the social networking space, where Orkut and Friendster are about as attractive as yesterday's dog food. Myspace, the hot item just six months ago, is in a brand tailspin from which it may not recover; even the kids are sneering at it. And the new darling? It's Facebook, which a year ago looked like a dead-end street.

For a long time, Facebook was a closed system. You had to have a college email address to get in. It was focused, but it also was obviously limited. Unless you're the Comic Book Guy, your college years tend to have a beginning and and end.

But Facebook has opened up in a smart way, giving its users fine-grained control over how much, and to whom, they want to reveal on their profile pages. It's made its system extensible by third-party developers, and as of today there are 2,254 applications in its library -- games, toys, mapping tools, enhanced messaging tools, devices that embed content from outside services in your profile page. (Unfortunately, it's a one-way street. You can embed Flickr image in Facebook, but you can't export your Facebook photo gallery for use elsewhere.)

Users are signing on in droves, and Facebook suddenly has blog buzz.

Twitter, a service designed for one-liner microblogging, may seem annoyingly shallow, but a similar tool on Facebook makes sense. Bruce Koon worked late last night. Terry Heaton is waiting on paperwork to close on his house. Bob Benz is going to see Lysistrata tonight. Jack Lail thinks Rusty Coats does a pretty good version of Werewolves of London. This is all utter trivia and not at all interesting to anyone ... unless you know the parties involved. It's addictive.

In a week my friend list has grown to over 70, mostly online newsfolk. I've joined NAA, OJR, ONA and other work-related groups on Facebook, plus one titled "My Last Name is Yelvington... and it's not THAT hard to spell."

Facebook's founders supposedly have turned down offers approaching a billion dollars for the site. Smart or not? Facebook is certainly ascendant. The question I have is: For how long?