I love poking conventional wisdom in the eye. I think that what this new client is going to let me do.

A few weeks back I had a chat with a venture capitalist who had a higher opinion of his knowledge of social media than I did. When he told me that Facebook and Twitter had filled the social network space and there just wasn't room for anything else, I found myself resisting the urge to ROFL.

And my very next business connection, re-enforced my belief that social networking, like social media, has only just begun. Not all things have been invented yet. I got reminded that just when the conventional wisdom declared that Search was a worthless category, a couple of Stanford kids started Google.

Later that day, my old friend Azhar Khan contacted me with a clear example of where social networking can and will go. I knew Azhar from Riya, which he co-founded and where I consulted. Later Riya became Like.com and was recently purchased by Google. It had evolved into something far different--and apparently more valuable--than the photo recognition software we had launched in 2006.

Azhar showed me something which is clearly a new kind of social network, one that has two very intelligent twists or so it seems to me. First, it is for people who want to find dates. Second,  the person seeking a date issues a challenge. It can be something like "show me your best dance move," or "write a song about me. It's all done on user-generated video.

Take a look at the final alpha site. It tells you a lot about how it works. The people you see were recruited mostly on the streets of Santa Cruz, but they are real people and capture a sense of how the site will work.

I'm going to help the Challenge Dating team take the next step and go into live beta sometime in the next few weeks. It is for women seeking men, men seeking women, as well as same sex dates.

But instead of the company holding the cameras, the challengers will upload their own videos and those wishing to meet the challenge will upload videos as well.

There is much tweaking to do. I'm pre-announcing what we are up to now, because we want user and viewer feedback. In the end, people who use a social network rule the social network.  Is Challenge Dating something you would use? Do you think you might visit because it will be entertaining.

How far away can a date live and still be geographically desirable. How can we make dating safe? Do you think the network will grow on it's own once we release it or do we need to offer some sort of incentives?

Please tell me what you think. Please tell me how we can make this better.

I am looking for unconventional wisdom. It makes far more interesting and valuable companies than conventionality allows.

Back in 2005, Robert Scoble and I collaborated on a book about blogging for business called Naked Conversations, which seems to have done pretty well. We went on to collaborate on an eBook for Dow Jones, then for a stint on the ill-fated FastCompany.TV.

Along with that Robert and I spoke together a lot. I'm not sure how many times but it was around twenty.

By 2008, blogging evolved into social media. The small, but global, band of conversational tool enthusiasts, had morphed into more than a half-billion people in virtually every country with broadband access.

In 2005, blogging was a disruptive force. Now the tools of social media are a part of a great many people's everyday lives. Instead of talking about them all the time, we are just using them to communicate or get our jobs done.

After the Fast Company interlude, Robert joined Rackspace , where he runs  building43, a community of fanatical Internet users, many of whom he video interviews.

I went on to write Twitterville, then get immersed on consulting companies  on how to use social media to achieve business goals. It seems that without design Robert and I got immersed in different parts of the Global Neighborhood and saw each other less and less.

We have not appeared anywhere together since 2008. The last time we actually saw each other was over a year ago.

So, when Mark Kithcart, a friend who I met when I briefly consulted  in Santa Rosa-based Democrosoft , invited me to speak at the wine-country Wow10 Event and he asked me if Scoble would join, I figured it was time for a public reunion.

I had thought Robert and I were going to be interviewed by someone about how the social media industry had changed since 2005. I thought "Naked Reunion" would be a good name for it.

But the event has changed just a bit. Robert and I will now be part of a roundtable and the questions will be whatever attendees want to ask us. This is probably a better idea. Then people can talk about whatever is on their minds rather than ours.

I've also noticed that Robert and I no longer has top billing in event promotion. The wine-tasting part does. This is a good thing. Because if it turns out that after all this time, Robert and I really suck together on stage, the wine will make it less important to attendees,

I hope we see you there. In any case, it will be great to once again sit on the dais with Robert.

[Matt Cutts on Mt. Kilimanjaro]

Matt Cutts, Google's most popular blogger and social media community denizen recently went to the mountain.

Perhaps, at the mountain, he had a dream, a dream that one day Google will rise up and live out the true meaning of social media. Perhaps in his dream, Google will develop a social network that ensure all digital children will walk free, free from the fear that their identities and personal information will not be abused by Facebook or some other force not committed to do no evil.

It seems that community is very much in Matt's DNA, despite his day job as a Google SEO honcho. This is relevant because Om Malick recently speculated that Google keeps botching social network efforts because it has a defective social gene.

I disagree and have written why. I am not Google champion, but it seems to me that we social media users would be a lot better off if Google could give us a viable alternative to what we have now.

So here, free of charge, are a few suggestions on how Google could, for once, get it right in social media. And since Matt Cutts is an SEO guy, I know that he will read this if I keep saying "Matt Cutts."

So let me put this in the form of An Open Letter to Matt Cutts. I know you're not the decision maker, but I'm pretty sure this post will catch your Matt Cutts eyes.

1. Start with Matt Cutts.

Matt Cutts is really very good at social networking. He's strong and respected in blogging and Twitter. Move him off of SEO and get him to start a skunkworks. Among his primary jobs is will be to teach others at Google just what Matt Cutts is doing so very well. Get a few SM enablers on staff--not to reach outward, but to teach inward. This is vital because you keep trying to attract a user that you just don't understand.

2. Ask the SM community for help.

You are Google for gawd sakes. You are surrounded by the pioneers who started this seminal global movement. Create a Board of Advisers and meet with them regularly. Start with a one day off campus. Primary agenda: They talk. Google listens.

3. Start small like you did with Google search.

Back then,  you launched modestly and word of mouth carried you beyond most people's imaginations. Now you have traditional marketers try to push products into new marketplaces with old-time hoopla. It just doesn't work that way. As you recently experienced, Buzz is the last thing you hear before you get stung.

4. Make it customizable

GMail is starting to feel like an old-time customer portal. You keep trying to integrate  all your stuff and get it in front of us. Some people appreciate this, but it's annoying others. Let us decide where to put your services and which to delete altogether. Why on earth can't I put Maps on my top level instead of Google Reader which I rarely use anymore? Why can't I decide.

5. Make 'no evil' your differentiator.

This is the most important of all. It's fundamental to fixing your recessive social gene.

We all know who your competition is. We all know what we don't like about it. What we do like is that its easy to find friends, customers, prospects and people who share our interests.

Make it that easy, but add one ABSOLUTE guarantee: you will not mess with user data. You never, ever will use our data without our opted-in permission.

[NOTE--  I recently completed several posts on a 10-day, 2700-mile road trip through California, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Nevada.  For transportation, we drove a 2010 Ford Escape Hybrid, loaned to us by Ford Motors in return for my objective review, which follows here.]

I pitched Scott Monty at Ford Motors on a lark. I was planning a summer road trip and wondered if I could review a Ford Fusion Hybrid as I, and my wife, bopped around the US Northwest visiting family and National Parks.

My pitch was that I would write from the perspective of an everyday driver, who handles a car differently than professionals who actually understand cars and how to drive them. My hidden agenda was the hope that I'd get better mileage than my own aging Acura RL has been getting.

Scott liked the idea and put me in touch with Gwen Peake, a digital communications manager who steered me away from the fusion and into a new Escape Hybrid, a four-passenger SUV, which she said would give us more power and a better view of the roadside beauties we were looking for.

I agreed,  figuring Ford would know better than me. They were absolutely right. Overall, my wife Paula and I loved almost everything about the Escape. My 90-year-old mother-in-law who tested the back seat for the first 400 miles of our junket directed me to ditch my Acura and go out and buy one of these immediately.

If this were the time for me to buy a new car, the Escape Hybrid would be a major candidate.

It took us less than 500 miles to get used to both the unique characteristics of the near silent motor and the bigness of the SUV. In fact, the Escape handled pretty much like my four-door sedan. It handled hills and curves well. It had plenty of pick up. It held easily in wind gusts. It was silent, smooth, spacious and solid.

One surprise is that we found it as quiet inside as in my luxury sedan, which would be about twice the price of the $30K hybrid if I bought a new one today. We found the sound system, visibility dashboard gave us everything we would want in a car.

Most of our driving was on open roads. We climbed up as high as 8900 feet in the Rockies and were on lots of sparsely driven back-roads, testing it's performance, which cost me $85 in Eastern Idaho. Our mileage never went below 30 MPH or above 32. We tried regular, medium and high octane gas and both performance and mileage remained the same.

The rear section handled all the luggage three adults needed, leaving the back seat open for human habitation.

There was some slight strain when we tromped the accelerator while climbing the steeper stretches of Rocky Mountain road. The tachometer went above 4000 and we heard sort of a wimpy whiny sound. But I would expect that. The temperature was often above 90. The air thin, the incline sharp and few cars would take those hills without complaining.

Ford has a deal with Microsoft, which puts a Windows into every dashboard. It's called Synch and manages Bluetooth and USB connected devices. It also handles the navigation system. Both Paula and I have used Nav systems before but we could not decipher how to program this one for a destination. We brought it to a Ford dealership where a nice sales lady read pages from the manual. She got it to work once then failed on a second try.

We were also puzzled why playing an iPod through Synch was more confusing than playing music through the iPod. This may have all been user error, but it seemed to us that Synch could be made a lot easier.

This is a new generation of SUV, one that doesn't bother with four-wheel drive. It is probably designed more for the soccer mom/pop than the off-road aficionado.

From what I could make out, the Escape Hybrid fills the bill in every way.

(Old Faithful in the early morning sun. Photos by Shel)

[NOTE:  This is the 6th in a series of off-topic posts. My wife Paula and I  recently completed a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest.]

I have traveled a good deal.  There is no place that I have seen on earth that compares to Yellowstone National Park for unique and diverse beauty. Like Jackson Hole, I had been to Yellowstone more than 40 years earlier.  While Jackson was less than I had remembered it to be, Yellowstone was a great deal more.

The lakes, waterfalls, forests, geysers, cliffs frosted with gold and red mineral deposits, buffalo, elk, solitude, crowds, meadows and forests, steam-heated swimming holes, there is simply more to see and do, more to drop your jaw down in amazement than anywhere I have ever seen or heard about.

Of course, we had far too little time to see what we wanted to see. We could have spent more than double the time just driving along the two loops seeing the most famous--and crowded--sites. The hope of taking a long hike to get away from people and closer to wildlife just did not come to pass.

I had received some good advice from Shelli Johnson, who I know on Twitter as YellowstoneShel. Shelli is the go-to person on national park visits, where she organizes and leads tours that are more organic than the bus schlep types. We didn't have time to folow most of her tips but she did point us to the Old Faithful Inn and Yellowstone Lake Hotel, the two iconic and historic places to stay.

The two Hotels are decidedly different. Old Faithful Inn  is a magnificent log structure. We watched the geyser from our room, from it's deck and from its front yard. Yellowstone Lake Hotel is built in the style of the rural grand hotels that you find in ew England and upstateNew York.

The views of the lake take your breath away. Both Hotels are designated historic landmarks and we were told that this designation banned wifi and TV. We did not miss them, particularly when sporadic Edge coverage became available briefly on our iPhones.

Both hotels have an historic elegance to them. You can just picture fashionably clad visitors of days gone by, filling the lobbies and dining rooms. Times have changed. There is a buffet in one and in the other we sat next to four bikers who were dressed for the road and guzzled more beer from the bottle than food from their plates.

None of that mattered.

What mattered was what you saw and smelled outside. Our first morning, we strolled the shore of Yellowstone Lake as the sun rose and colors changed by the second. We hopped in our car and drove less than two miles before we his a traffic jam caused by a wild buffalo strolling down the center strip. A short while later, we came across a few score of his friends and felt like we'd been transported back a hundred years.

They snort and roll in dirt. The young bulls constantly challenge each other. I was told that they have bad tempers and are not the smartest of creatures. Most folk were smart enough to maintain a respectful distance.

The places you've heard about are the most visited and are still absolutely worth the view. Places like Artists Lookout seem able to spread crowds out to give visitors some sense of what it must have been like before it became a mecca for tourist buses.

By the end of Yellowstone, I had realized one more thing that happens in the space of 40 years. Yellowstone may not have changed, but I had. All the packing and driving, mapping and moving was beginning to have an eroding effect on us.

We decided to cancel the final leg of our trip, cutting out Mt. Rushmore, the Dakota Badlands and Black Hills. We headed south through Wyoming and picked up highways to drive home over the next three days, stopping only to marvel at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

We got home a few days early, spending much of the first day napping and being thankful we did not have to drive anywhere.

We're grateful for the trip, but if we were to try another roadside adventure, we would visit fewer places and stay longer at each. This was a survey course, and there is a great deal to be enjoyed in the details.

Craters of the Moon, Idaho. Photo by Shel

[NOTE:  This is the 4th in a series of off-topic posts. My wife Paula and I  just completed a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest. The previous installment left off at Shasta Lake and this one picks up a few miles later. ]

From Lake Shasta we drove north past snow-crowned Mount Shasta. At Weed, Calif. we turned off I-5 and onto Route 97. With extremely few exceptions, we would not put wheels onto a highway for another 1200 miles and eight days. This was a wise choice.

On the Interstates you focus is on getting there, there's a sense of urgency. On back roads you focus is on being there's a sense of exploration. We stopped often to read historical markers, soak in magnificent views and enjoy assorted oddities along our way.

Route 97 extends north from Weed all the way to Canada. At an average height of 5000 is a scenic pageant of rivers, mountains, lava beds and forests.

Our biggest stop was at  Crater Lake, the bluest inland water body I've ever viewed. Filling 30 square miles of a collapsed volcano, it's surface is 7000 feet above the ocean and it's deepest point is 1900 feet, making it the deepest in the US.

From their, we continued north another 60 miles to the very pleasant little  city of Klamath Falls. Home of Oregon Tech and with a population of about 20,000, we had nice late-night Taco salads at Hidalgos Mexican Restaurant, then stayed in a safe, clean and affordable Great Western.

We continued north on 97 all the way to Bend where we caught up with Paula's daughter, her husband and two of our grand children for a weekend at Sunriver Resort. The first person to scout around this area was Kit Carson, but that was before it had its own airport, golf course, swimming pools and tennis courts. We got a great deal on a fabulous house that slept five adults and two kids for two nights for less than $1K. We biked, jogged, swam, ate at a great restaurant and on our own deck, enjoyed free in-home wifi and just sat on the rear porch looking at pine trees. I'm not big on resorts usually, but this one gets a top rating in my view for having a great balance between recreation and serenity.

After Sunriver, our goal was to get to the big tomato of our trip, Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. We drove a few miles north on 97 to US 20 east, which crosses into Idaho. We had no big plans for Idaho, a state that I know potatoes and HP printers. But we were surprised by its open space unrelenting beauty.

We made an over-night stop in downtown Boise at a Hampton Inn. The rooms were pleasant but the breakfast memorably awful.

In the morning, Highway 20 followed the Interstate for a while, then cut  into sparsely populated land you picture riding on a horse. It's a gently curvy road, part river meadow, rolling hills and some badland with mesa and cathedral rock formations erupting from time-to-time. There were also some large stands of white birch.

This was not an area for cute shops and restaurants. Paula and I had some steak sandwiches and we pulled over at Riley, Idaho. The sign said population 17, but I suspect they were exaggerating. We dined on rickety picnic benches, with a spectacular view blocked slightly by a port-a-johnny that was thankfully downwind.

We drove through the Sawtooth National Forest, the turnoff for the posh Sun Valley resort, abandoned gold mines and the out-of-use Rattlesnake Station, stage coach stop.

Then we went to the moon. Route 20's absolute high point is Craters of the Moon National Monument. I took the photo at the top of this page from one stop on a seven-mile loop. My photos did not capture the eerie sense of this area of eight volcanic disturbances, the most recent being a mere 1500 years ago. The lava fields we saw 800 miles west in Southern Oregon are part of this massive, unfinished area.

It really does feel like you are walking on the moon. Paula and I have seen the lava fields of the Big Island of Hawaii, but for some reason, these felt even more moonlike.

We stayed less than an hour and continued East. At most every stop we felt the pang of wanting to stay longer. We had seen so much and had so much more to see.

Our next stop would be the tourist mecca of Jackson Hole, WY, where I had last visited 43 years earlier. I learned that my memory could move mountains.

[NOTE:  This is the 3rd in a series of off-topic posts. I've just returned from a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest. It was part-family oriented, part a visit to some of my best visual memories and in part a review of the new Ford Escape Hybrid, which Ford Motors loaned me for evaluation purposes.]

We began grumpy and came home exhausted. In between, Paula and I had one if the best experiences of our lives. We were gone 10 days, slept in nine different places and got to experience the bigness, the beauty and diversity of the American northwest.

The highlights of the trip were a two-day visit to Sunriver, Ore., a resort in Bend Ore., and visits to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. But the connecting points--the towns and back roads, the little spontaneous explorations were almost equal in interest and discovery.

For some reason our vacations are almost always preceded by about a week of tumult. This one was a record setter. Paula got sick. Her mother, Jean Berman, 91, had an infected leg, which doctors attached to a clumsy medical vacuum machine until a few days prior to our departure. Our younger daughter and her two small children visited us until the day before our departure. For the first time since my heart surgery, I was feeling some chest pains and worrying.

When the tires of the Escape rolled onto our street from our driveway, I was still waiting for Paula to shout out, "wait, I can't do this. I need a rest," but she didn't. We picked up Jean in Fremont and were on the road at 9 a.m. as scheduled.

It was 85 in Fremont at 9 am when we hit the road. By the time we stopped for lunch at the Vacaville In-N-Out Burger, it was 102. We did not yet know that our departure date would be the hottest day of the year in Northern California.

After lunch,  we connected north onto the tedious stretch of I-5 to Redding.  We bickered about unimportant things as we sat in traffic, looking at flat agribiz-owned farmland. The temperature kept rising. This was the most boring stretch we would experience. It was made more difficult by a few serious construction delays.

Redding turned out to be the geographic wormhole. Before it was redundant flatland. After were evergreen forests, pristine lakes and a surprising number of snow capped mountains--always a surprise in 100 degree weather.

The biggest and most breath-taking was Lassen  stands tall and powerful over everything else. We regretted not having time to visit Lassen National Park.

We turned off for the next point of interest. Lake Shasta was our first scheduled stop. We drove through the aging City of Lake Shasta onto Shasta Dam Road. As we drove through the small city, Paula and Jean wondered why there were no people on the streets in mid-afternoon.

Our dashboard said the outside temperature was 105 degrees.

We stopped for a moment to watch a few people swimming and boating and fishing and enjoying a cooler time than we felt in the parking lot. I caught site of a speckled eagle, the first I've ever seen. The fleet-flying, fierce-looking was far too fast for me to catch a photo.

At the dam, we spent a little time at the highly informative visitor center, where we caught our breath and felt our collective moods elevate. We were looking at incredible beauty.

We were on vacation.

[Note. Mount Lassen & the speckled eagles are file photos gleaned from Google images. I took the Shasta Lake & Dam shots.]

Sometimes I call myself a social media story teller. I often get advised that this is a weak position, that I should organize my presentation like big time analysts do it with lots of numbers and graphs or like recent MBAs do it, where the key points of a presentation are called, "key points."

I disagree. I find story telling to be powerful, memorable and effective. I find charts flashed on a screen to be puzzling and often forgettable. Sometimes talking points work, but often they are either redundant or forgettable cliches.

Sometimes, I open my talks by mentioning that back in 1987, I was the PR guy who gave the world PowerPoint. I pause,  then say,"forgive me." It always gets a laugh.

I do use PowerPoint, but mostly I just put up a photo of a person that I'm telling you about. If it's a marketing audience, then I may add a page of "takeaways" on my last slide. But I know the audience won't take away those closing bullet points.

They'll take away the stories of people whose faces I showed them. They will have certain key points that stay in their memory, even if I did not make those points, and those words never appeared in bullet point fashion.

Hopefully, one of my stories will contain information or insights that is useful or interesting to audience members and will help them adjust course where they work. I find telling stories let's people get inspired. I'm certain that demonstrating what I know does not.

Marketers today really have two courses to take in talking to customers. It doesn't matter if those customers are business people or consumers. The can make claims and deliver talking points, or they can tell stories.

Stories work in traditional marketing forms such as advertising and PR and they most certainly work in new marketing forms such as blogs and video.

It is something in our nature as humans that makes us lovers of stories. Story-telling is how we remember our ancestors. It probably goes all the way back to caves.

When Org and Morb came back from the hunt and the tribe held a great feast. At the end our hunters used grunts and gesture to tell the story of their adventure. Maybe they enhanced their effort by drawing little pictures with sticks in the dirt.

The next morning, while they slept, perhaps another member of the tribe, one not as adept at hunting, went to the wall of the cave, and using blood and berries, drew pictures on the cave that told the story of the great hunt.

This was story telling, but it was also--in some ways--the beginning of the marketing of that tribe continuity. It was the beginning of making representations that led to a common knowledge and it was an early dot on a continuum that gives us TV and YouTube.

Can you picture how it would have gone, if that first story teller had drawn bullet points to explain how the project was planned, executed and the return on investment along with lessons learned? Can you imagine a world, whose history is shaped by 10,000 years of PowerPoint.

The last time I spoke before taking a short break for open heart surgery, was to discuss Userville [formerly Blurring Boundaries] at SNCR's NewComm Forum. It was well-received, but candidly, it did not generate the kind of excitement I sensed when announcing either Naked Conversations or Twitterville.

Sometime, after they rerouted my heart at Stanford Hospital, I realized that there was less of my heart in the new book than there had been in my two prior attempts. I started thinking that maybe I was working on this book because I like writing books rather than, a sense that I had a great story to tell and was just bursting to tell it.

Two weeks ago I came home. I found myself more enmeshed in the Gizmodo-Apple fracas than I was the Userville story of how big companies like IBM, Intuit, Microsoft and SAP were finding, measuring, scaling and sustaining business value in social media.

I put Userville aside and started something new under the working title of "iPhoneGate--not a hero in the room."  Since I was confined to home until a few days ago, I spent a good deal of my time reading every word written by journalists covering it.

Once I could be mobile, I'd go out and start conducting my own interviews.

A few days ago. my friend Ken Yeung stopped by to help me with a project that I could not yet handle on my own.Ken had been a big booster of Twitterville, one of the project's most passionate supporters.

He didn't like the iPhoneGate idea. He told me he already knew more about the story than he wanted to know. He did not share my interest in how it redefines who and what press is and how laws must adjust.

I found myself quietly simmering.

After he was gone, I realized that I had just spent two weeks, and written over 10,000 words without checking with anyone on the concept, not in social media and not off.

Over the last few days, I have learned that most people share Ken Yeung's view and few people share my continuing fascination with iPhoneGate.

So here's the bottom line. I am abandoning both book projects, the first for lack of passion and the second for lack of audience. I'm going to take at least a short break on the book-writing business

I now have a repaired heart and vocationally a blank sheet of paper in front of me. Think I'll do some gardening and then figure out to do with the remainder of this extended life that I now have.

I could end up being something completely different.

Got any suggestions?

I've been having an interesting pair of discussions over on Twitter this morning about the twin blazing issues of Apple Computer's reaction to an iPhone G4 prototype being sold to Gizmodo and a Facebook user privacy policy seemingly designed by Rube Goldberg.

I'm very curious to know what everyday people think about either of these issues--if anything at all. What has surprised me is the number of people who seem quick to say they know of many people moving away from Apple product or leaving Facebook caring nothing whatsoever about it.

One woman told me that all her friends were switching from iPhone, but she later said she was "speaking figuratively." Same with my Twitter colleague who estimated that 60 percent of facebook would leave.

I just do not think that this is how a major brand, supported by hundreds of millions of people implode, It is not so simple and it is certainly not so fast.

Let there be no mistake. In my view the decisions and actions of Facebook and Apple are deathly serious and could have enormous, and long-lasting impact on corporate position.

That is if the actions of the last few weeks end up being datapoints on a timeline that show a reversal of company behavior, a behavior that continues for a prolonged period into the future.

There's really no doubt about it. Most people who use Apple products and Facebook don't like what these companies have done. They don't like it enough to remember the incidents for some time to come. They don't like it enough to insert privavcy and police in the night into conversations about these companies.

But so far, very, very few people will be willing to just walk away.

It's sort of like a loved one who disappoints you. Have you have a long, well-established relationship, that disappointment would have to be huge for you to just walk away. It should be.

But still, it makes you pause to think. It makes you watch the other party's words and acts a little more closely and with a tad greater suspicion. If there are subsequent breeches of faith, then you might start seriously examining other options.

And while such trends always start on a minuscule level, they can accelerate with great speed. Just look back. In my life. conventional wisdom told me that GM simply made the toughest and most enduring cars; that IBM literally owned the PC industry that no modern enterprise would trust open source applications; that IT would never allow the internet security dangers. We also knew that there three TV networks, and few powers were great than big media power.

And so on.

Each of these were tiny, little movements. Then one day, we blinked and generally recognized truths were no longer true and the new powers seemed to have come out of nowhere.

One of those two powers came out of Harvard University fraternity houses. Another, Apple Computer involves the restoration of an exiled founder named Steve Jobs. This latter one is the best industrial comeback story I know.

Both Apple and Facebook got to where they are with great speed and with few people seeing it coming. Both could return to oblivion with equal or perhaps great speed.

Whether this happens or not does not depend on a few poor choices they recently made. It depends upon what they do next.