Social Networking

Social networking technology, like all other technology, can be used to make things more convenient.  The most obvious implementation of this is advertising, as you see specified ads due to certain strings that people use in email, Facebook updates, or even search engines.  Also, as most already know, social network sites have a hold of their personal information and can do generally anything with it.
In the sense of convergence, the article "Real Facebook shop in virtual world breathes life into Mars" states that Facebook and Mars are working together to sell real products through Facebook.  This is a splendid idea, as they are combining two convenient tasks done often over the Internet - online shopping and Facebook.  Maybe in the next step, they can somehow implement celebrity gossip collaboration blogs.

Social networking technology provides both detriments and benefits to society.

Benefits, as stated, is a much more convenient world.  Facebook has pretty much every personal communication method I can think of available on its own site - including voice calls (phone), video chat, instant messaging, messaging in general (e-mail), and short publicly-viewed messages (happy birthday!).

Detriments, or the "dark side," are defined briefly in Facebook Exodus.  People have compared Facebook with the devil and North Korea, two things often viewed in a negative light.  I particularly agree with the point of how people become dependent on Facebook, while Facebook increases the users' dependency.
Personally, though, I am not a huge user of social networking sites.  My first twitter account was made for CIS 3810, and I post a random Facebook update maybe twice a month.  The only time I check Facebook is when I'm bored on the commute.  However, I have heard comments from my friends many times about how "blah blah blah blah on Facebook."  Maybe it's true - maybe Facebook is slowly turning us into sheep, and we'll eventually be throwing money at them so we can waste more time.

Additionally, while convenience is usually viewed as a positive value, convenience also makes it easier to do negative things.  "Facebook stalking" is a popular term I hear a lot, and although it is usually used between friends as fun and jokes, it can be interpreted as simply creepy.  Of course, this eventually merges with privacy, but that deserves a post of its own.

In the future, I believe that social networking will continue to evolve into more complex entities.  In the beginning, Facebook was very simple and wasn't plagued with extensions, addons, modifications, etc.  But several years later, we see Facebook with n optional extensions.  There are often people that click bad links and start sending their friends weird messages that are obvious phishing/spam attempts.  There are applications that bloat one's Facebook page, making it tedious to view, or bloat the newsfeed increasing the amount of junk one must sift through.  As time progresses, social networking will become more and more complicated, and I am not looking forward to it.