Am I the only one to think that social networking sites are being talked too far into the stratosphere? There is a serious possibility, published in many papers this week, that Microsoft might pay $500m for a mere 5 per cent of Facebook. That would value Facebook at $10bn before it has even worked out a proper revenue-creating business. It makes the $580m News Corp paid for MySpace in 2005 look like a steal.
The trouble as I see it, is that revenues and profits are just as important as the number of members or potential members Facebook has. Many, many start-ups during last high-tech boom faltered on just that point.

But my doubts don't end there. There are a whole load of look-alikes and other shades of social networking sites that are working hard to chip away at Facebook. Surely it is only time before one or more of them become the next cool thing on campus and Facebook is relegated to a slightly embarrassing anachronism? After all, Facebook itself has come from nowhere to the Talk of the Town in the time it takes for a student to sink a triple at happy hour.

And blasphemous as it sounds, I do wonder about the longevity of social networking sites. Anybody with an ounce of curiosity in them has registered on at least one social networking site of relevance to them. But how many dedicated, regular users does that actually produce? I have at least two accounts that have been dormant for months.
There are other reasons to think that the gloss could come off the whole idea, shrinking it back to the student population from whence it came. The main one is the damage they can inflict on the reputations of people who have a reputation to lose - and that means just about anybody in gainful employment. Take the two British tennis players, David Rice and Naomi Broady, whose young careers may just have been ended this week by the information they posted on Bebo. In essence, they admitted they enjoyed partying and the odd drink. For that, they were suspended by the Lawn Tennis Association. There are hundreds of similar examples in the public domain and possibly thousands that have stayed private. The trouble is, almost any piece of information or picture could be construed negatively by a colleague or manager. There is not yet the critical negative momentum for social networking to be seen as a career faux-pas, but it is surely not far away.

The days when you went to stadium, bought a ticket and watched the match or concert a couple of weeks later are a distant memory. Tickets are now sold predominantly by telephone and online by a confusing variety of agents. A large amount of these tickets then end up on an unofficial secondary market that is still illegal in many countries.

Scalping or ticket touting has a bad name but it is surely in tune with our times – the market decides the price. Except that a joined-up market does not really exist: the ticket touts operate independently of each other so the consumer has no way of knowing what the going rate is for tickets on the black market.

Enter ticketing reselling websites. They offer fans and touts alike the opportunity to sell to each other as they wish and provide hitherto unobtainable pricing transparency. The sites are evangelical about their services. Joe Cohen, chief executive of Seatwave, says: “The secondary market is here to stay and we must all work together to ensure fans get the best deals and receive the best protection.”

Well the kind of service Seatwave provides certainly seems to be a move in the right direction. But there is surely a further evolution in the model. After all, the reselling website model still denies customers complete transparency: the tickets are still sourced from a whole variety of agents and then resold on a whole variety of reselling websites. Consumers would still have to do a lot of homework and spend a lot of time before being assured they were paying a reasonable price. This is surely far less than satisfactory. This situation does exist in financial markets, but participants in these markets usually have analysts and computer models at hand to calculate the best price at any one time. Consumers do not have such tools to hand.

Surely the solution is for sports clubs and music venues to place all tickets on eBay and let the highest bidders take the tickets. The clubs and venues may well be accused of pricing “ordinary” people out of the market, but that is effectively what happens anyway. This is just a more rational way of doing it and ensures that the clubs and venues take the revenues and not the middlemen (except eBay of course).

Is Europe being set up for a fall again? In the last tech boom, European venture-backed companies caught the investment wave depressingly late and were dead in the water before they had time to show their mettle. At the same, many US VCs had already exited some of their investments by the time markets collapsed and so were, financially speaking, able to weather the storm better.

There are indications that this time round may be no different. With world debt and equity markets precariously poised, US investors have slowed down investments in the Web 2.0/social networking space. According to figures out this week from Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young, Web 2.0 investment fell in the US to $357m in the first six months of the year. This compares to a doubling of investment in Europe to $51.5m over the same period. How can we explain this apparent divergence of views?

Either European investors know something that US investors have missed or it's the other way round. In other words, it is possible that a clutch of European Web 2.0 companies has recently sprung up offering services not offered by the vast array of Stateside start-ups. But it is equally possible that US investors have sensed a coming slowdown in the sector, perhaps due to saturation and lack of exit opportunities.

Either explanation is plausible, but history suggests European investors may be in for a rough ride again.

Another day, another call to close the "funding gap". The latest rallying cry comes from David Gill, managing partner of ETCapital, during the Cambridge Enterprise Conference last month. Mr Gill reportedly called on the UK government to set up a scheme that bridged the gap between the twin start-up sources of government innovation grants and angel investment, and later-stage VC backing. Mr Gill undoubtedly knows the VC market better than I, but isn't capitalism all about supply meeting demand? In other words, if the start-up companies are good enough they will find funding somewhere down the value chain. Take angel investors: although they clearly have limits to their resources, networks exist up and down the country so that the angels' friends can be introduced to juicy-looking slices of action. Cambridge, in particular, has no shortage of angel networks that will supply funding and expertise to companies that show promise.

After chatting to the head of the European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association this week it was clear that the dramatic changes recently made to the industry body are more than merely cosmetic. The EVCA decided in June to split itself up and become an umbrella group for three independent groups dealing with the different interests of large buy-out groups, mid-market buy-out companies and venture capital groups. They will have independent boards and charge their own fees.

This has been a long time coming. Grumbling by venture capitalists that their interests were not being served by their elected industry representatives stopped being funny a long time ago. In fact, most had pretty much given up complaining about being lumped in with buyout funds every time criticism was levelled at the wider private equity industry. As for the EVCA strongly actually championing their cause, the prospect seemed remote.

But the EVCA, perhaps spurred by the criticism, seems to have cranked up a gear. Javier Echarri tells me it is scaling up its roadshows to promote venture capital in particular. A series of roadshows are to take place starting in Australia in November and then move on to the US and Canada. In addition, a life sciences action plan is being set up in conjunction with the European Commission.

There will still be some doubters about the EVCA's ability to truly represent its smallest constituents, but surely this at least shows good faith?