Back in 2005 (a long time in the social media world), Yahoo (YHOO) acquired Delicious, the popular social bookmarking website. Both Yahoo and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter had big plans to change the way we share, remember, and discover information on the Internet. Yahoo even promised “to give Delicious the resources, support, and room it needs to continue growing the service and community.”

So where is it now? Unfortunately, in the case of Delicious, nowhere.

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Is the newspaper business sustainable? Not any more. Is the community network business sustainable? Yes. And at the hyperlocal level.

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On TV, content is king. But on the Web, community may reign supreme. Throughout television history, the way to lure most viewers was to air the best shows. It doesn’t necessarily work that way on the Web, where many shows can be seen on multiple sites.

Take the recent announcement by CBS (CBS) that it would begin airing shows like Showtime’s “Dexter” and Sony Pictures Television’s (SNE) “Bewitched” on TV.com, CBS’s online site for full-length video. But none of the more than 1,000 new programs are exclusive to TV.com. And the episodes of “Bewitched,” the classic sitcom featuring the nose-wrinkling witch Samantha, are already on rival Hulu, the joint site of NBC Universal and News Corp. (NWS). “Every major studio right now is following a nonexclusive strategy” online, says Arash Amel, senior analyst with London-based media researcher Screen Digest. “The question for these sites is beginning to be, ‘how do you differentiate yourself beyond the content you have?’”

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Beta, as it pertains to Web sites, has seen better days. Not long ago, saying the word as part of your Web development cycle could help land venture capital even faster than claiming “community,” “paradigm shift” or “disruptive technology.” Now, the term is dissipated and confusing.

While the specific origin of its use is unknown, beta as a tagline was popularized by a Google (GOOG) with the release of Google News in 2002, and later, Gmail in 2004. From there, start-ups quickly followed suit. By 2006, it seemed like every new Web site was “in beta.”

When confronted about the phenomenon, Google co-founder Larry Page told investors, “It’s really a messaging and branding thing. If it’s on [Google News and Gmail] for five years, that’s fine.” Google News unceremoniously left beta a year later. Gmail, which is more reliable than most nonbeta software, has yet to do so.

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The idea for a virtual world focused on the Islamic lifestyle began five years ago, when CEO Mohamed El-Fatatry moved from Dubai to Finland in order to attend university. Raised in Dubai, El-Fatatry wanted wider horizons and a chance to see more of life. American universities were generally expensive, so El-Fatatry sat down at his computer, Googled for “media technology studies in Europe,” and found a Finnish university as his third hit. Finland offers free higher education, even for foreigners, so El-Fatatry applied, enrolled, and only then headed to his new country for the first time.

With €300 and an uncertain future, he took a job delivering newspapers to make some extra cash as he studied. The entire journey was a trip into the unknown for El-Fatatry, but after doing it, he found that he now had the “guts” to take more risks. By 2006, he had created the Internet start-up Muxlim, a social-networking and community site for Western Muslims.

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Over the last five years I have been asked countless times: “Steve, what’s the next hot online community?” It seems as though everybody is on the lookout for the successor to MySpace, Twitter or Facebook. Nobody, even in a difficult economic climate, wants to be viewed as a latecomer.

Perhaps as a defense mechanism to avoid being wrong myself, I now give a boilerplate answer that I believe can last. In short, the next big community is not a single destination. Rather, it is going to be everywhere. To paraphrase Forrester analyst Charlene Li, social networking is becoming “like air.”

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I think Facebook is about to reach a very critical point in its development. It needs to answer a very basic question: Does it want to be needed or loved as a brand and as a service? I always pondered this question back in the good old days of AOL’s development. Is it a fun, community-based service that is free and aside of one’s life focused on one-to-one communications and chat? Or is it a utility that becomes a front page and starting point for its customers who pay with time and click streams and live their life on the Net? Is it consumer based or more of a B-to-B platform for others to reach consumers? Very few franchises get to be BOTH needed and loved.

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