How the old web economy becomes next generation

So Google floats and everyone gets giddy again. They said that search was dead after CMGI acquired Alta Vista. You may be saying CMGI-who? Yahoo had switched for zillionth time to some new backend. Remember when Inktomi was actually worth something?
Now enter the “new” economy. News Corp buys MySpace for $600M and E-Bay buys Skype for $2.4B all based on the fact that some theorist says that the network is everything. Well my feeling is that the Cluetrain may need to get a bit of clue. “A powerful global conversation” may have started but when the street meets Indian call centre many people may be hanging up and quick. Wouldn’t Karl Rove be getting excited about now!
So the promise of the internet returns in the form of social networking sites. Aren't free unfettered networking businesses fun? Well they are fun because they are not clouded with really obnoxious revenue models like animated advertising on every page and they don’t email you every ten minutes with some new offer and they don’t secretly sell their mailing lists to anyone who wants them. Part of the secret of their popularity is the straight forward presentation of their use case and the possibility for total anarchy. You can talk about anything and it is likely that there is someone out there who wants to hear it and the biggest plus is you own it!!
As the rich established portals / media companies acquire these businesses and (or) try to integrate social networking models into existing classified structures they are going to come up against the problem of trying to teach an old dog a new trick.
How do you take a model like MySpace and integrate into it classified ads from regional newspapers? I guess finding these items would be easier and potentially the speed of access to the item is much increased but what about the fact that I don’t want my explicit information and implicit and tacit behaviour used to make me a target for lawn mower ad.
I personally do not want to use a service which uses my desire to control my network space as a vehicle to push products on me or my metrics as means to predict what I will do next.
There is a huge push to take advantage of the user owned / defined content and the cheap user acquisition costs of these social networking start ups but there is going to be significant difficulty and potential mistakes in trying to integrate old school models into these new environments.
Integrating the old school and the next generation is not going to be simple and just because I am talking about Ferrari does not mean I am going to buy one. Trust is a big issue but so is convenience and what about good old price?
Most of these networks will eventually fail as independent businesses. A few will survive and they will be acquired by larger media partners who want to take advantage of their cheap success but this is where the fun will begin.
The key question now is how will they make them work? Stay tuned.