“So, what we’re seeing isn’t the expansion of our social network; it’s the shrinking of what and who we care about. My Facebook feed is full of what friends are listening to, what friends are reading, etc. And frankly, I don’t give a damn. I would care if they told me personally; I’d even care if they used a medium as semi-personal as Twitter. The effort required to tweet tells me that someone thought it was important. And I do care about that. I will care much less if Spotify and Rdio integrate with Twitter. I already don’t care about the blizzard of automated tweets from FourSquare.”

From Mike Loukides - The End of Social.

For the most part, I think speculating about Social Media on the whole is kind of a waste of breath, it is what it is and it will organically change over time. That being said, I think the point of this article that the automated updates being fed into Facebook definitely devalue it. Not being a huge FB user myself I can't really speak to how it's changed the mindset of the enormous user base but I can say that the personal curation of services like Twitter and Tumblr do it better. If someone posts "Currently listening to..." or "Just checked in at..." updates too often, they're out - forever. I'm not going back if all you have to share is mediocre, dry, facts about your activities. Personality, even if it's your Online Persona, is key to all social services being worthwhile.. at least as far as I can tell.