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The panic scenario du jour. Is Yahoo! fronting points for Big Bandwidth? Instead of dumping your links and running, you might want to join this conversation. Can social media enthusiasts help prevent atherosclerosis on the Information Highway? Your Tweet could be just a twirp in two years according to a Nemertes Research study gracias a Paul McDougall at Info Week. This is outside "the comunity" suff a la A.D. Little... Those who seek to differentiate web world from financial world, separate social media agencies from old line ad agencies, think twice... because money markets usually don't think that way. Let's say Big Bandwidth wants $70 billion to juice up the fiber on the Information Superhighway to avoid "internet outages" in the US and to help their strategic ally bandwidth providers in continental Europe and the UK. This is how job creation is done... after all, one of the most anxiety provoking things in life is a slow, or erratic internet connection. Don't you think a diverson of that large an amount might capital might step on the social media sector's ability to access low interest bridge loans, capital markets, VC fund pools? Before we all get collective amnesia, it was indeed Al Gore who facilitated construction of the "Information Superhighway" during the Clingons co-presidency. Gore went to Stockholm for global warming, not the dot com bustout that came down during his watch. He would be wont to admit he didn't do a very good job of educating us to the market reality us that bandwidth is as fungible as energy. Social media software, gadgets and advertising are not. Paying more to Big Bandwidth for access won't stop innovators from innovating. But it might cause some shakeout in the social media ecosystem... and it is likely to cause the cost of building communities and pesonal branding projects to go up. Like Bill Haley used to say, "shake, rattle & roll".