David Hornik is a partner at August Capital and the author of the VentureBlog. For some time now, he has not only been excited about the power of the new Web log platforms and he also put the money where his mouth was by funding several start-ups involved in this technology.

Nevertheless, he feels that despite genuine reason for excitement this nascent industry finds itself stuck on - itself.

His objection is the proliferation of panels on - circle the applicable - blogs, social software, RSS, social networking, emergent technology etc. He condenses the essential content of any past and future social-software panel into:

Social networking is blogging dumbed down for the masses blah blah blah tribecaster blah blah blah widget blah blah blah What is the connection between social networks and blogs? blah blah blah the most efficient media platform ever blah blah blah read-write, not read-only blah blah blah All software is about people blah blah blah put this stuff in context blah blah blah monetizing relationships blah blah blah a new dimension to the Web blah blah blah I met my wife on Match.com blah blah blah.

That strikes me as fair, if rather harsh, representation of many of such gatherings. I am sure that they have their uses, mind you, meeting people who independently arrive at similar conclusions about new technology and its application is a tremendous boost to any entrepreneur trying to put them to work. However, there is a limit to how much progress such talking and 'panelling' can bring about.

So I grinned when I read this on his blog the first time round but Hornik now relates how a torrent of responses to this 'transcript' propelled him to the place of No.1 sceptic of social software. He explains his position in an article in CNETnews.com.

Without exaggeration, I think that blogging software is revolutionizing the way people communicate--whether to share pictures with family members or distribute a product spec to an engineering team. And I think that RSS (Really Simple Syndication) will enable one-to-one communication of content, pricing, trends, etc., in such a simple fashion that all information will ultimately have an associated data feed.

I do not believe that any more public flogging of these ideas is going to help move that technology forward.

I cannot argue with that either.

Social software, as a general matter, is a good idea. But in the particular instances we've seen to date, there are a lot of things that make little sense, provide little value and will not sustain the interest of the users.

Yet over the last 12 months, we have all done about as much talking as we have building. It is time to call a moratorium on the "blah blah blah" and get down to the business of building great software. To paraphrase Kenny Rogers, there'll be time enough for talkin' when the building's done.

Indeed. Let's get on with it then.

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