2. Yogi Berra’s law of popularity.  The much quoted former US baseball star once explained why a restaurant had started to decline: “no one goes there anymore, its got too popular.”  Now that just about everyone is on Facebook, it has no social cachet, it is merely a dull utility.

3. The first law of cool - no one is less cool than your parents.  Facebook started as a craze among college kids looking for a hot date.  It was cool, underground and alternative - the fact that the university authorities tried to ban it merely added to its mystique.  Now that your mum and dad are on Facebook, it’s time to hangout somewhere else.

4. Just because your paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.  The wise people at Facebook keep saying that privacy isn’t an issue (the privacy word was mentioned a gazillion times in this week’s IPO) and that we are worrying unnecessarily. No we aren’t.  Up until now, people have been willing to trade privacy for utility: ‘Facebook is so dam useful’.  The introduction of Timeline will shift this delicate balance.  Suddenly being reminded about all the stupid things they’ve said and done during the past eight years will remind people that privacy is important and is worth protecting.

5. Making money is not a social purpose.  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when reading in Zuckerberg’s letter announcing the IPO that Facebook has a social purpose: “to make the world more open and connected.”  Compared to the guerrilla evangelists of transparency at Wikileaks, Facebook’s declared commitment to openness sounds pretty hollow.  Openness is not knowing how drunk my boss got last night.  Equally, just about every business in the telecoms sector can claim to encourage connections and connectivity.  Facebook’s original purpose was to find good looking people on campus.  Its current purpose is to generate tons of cash by convincing corporations that it can offer advertising nirvana: I sat through one of their sales pitches last week – it is very compelling.

Of course, failure is a relative term.  Facebook won’t collapse over-night.  But in ten year’s time, will we look back at this week’s events as another AOL?

Barton has argued that using Twitter has allowed him to circumvent a cynical media, talk directly to football fans and reveal his true character rather than the monster despicted in the press.  It is a strategy that appears to be working.  He  has over one million followers on Twitter and the media has fallen in love with the parable of ‘bad boy turned philosopher.’

Barton’s story also has interesting implications for corporations.  It underlines how authenticity, openness and the smart use of technology can transform even the most damaged of reputations.  Barton’s tweets haven’t been crafted by agents or corporate communications professionals.  Some of the content may be surprising – “footballer reads a book shock!” – but it feels undeniably real and authentic.

I look forward to seeing which social media conference organiser has the vision and clout to secure Barton as a keynote speaker.  The Q&A will certainly be worth buying a ticket for.

Technology is a wonderful thing: I have written two books charting its effect on people’s behaviour and expectations, so I hope I could never be described as a Luddite.  Algorithms have become cool: Robert Harris’ new book, The Fear Index, is about a maths genius who creates a revolutionary form of artificial intelligence that tracks human emotions, enabling him to predict movements in the financial markets with uncanny accuracy.  But machines will never understand people as well as people understand people. This is why success in social media is more dependent on an understanding of human behaviour than an understanding of technology and why some of the best thinking on the subject is coming from anthropologists and social psychologists, who have an appreciation of the social and cultural impact of this new technology.

I run workshops that aim to help people to become more insightful and one of the key points I make is to trust your instincts.  Interrogation of data and people is important; social media analysis can provides us with an abundance of real time data; and algorythms have turned Google into the world’s most influential business, but I have yet to come across a breakthrough insight that didn’t come from someone’s imagination, intellect and observational skills.  Being an insightful person – and everyone can learn how to be insightful – may no longer be required to locate your mates in a pub, but it has never been more important.

I am not sure whether Johnson has studied ancient history, but he is clearly a devotee of the Aristotle school of management.  Unlike Plato, who believed in the need for authoritarian direction if anything of value was to be achieved, Aristotle believed in man as a social animal who needed a sense of participation in own destiny.  I hope Johnson’s decision is vindicated … just so long as England’s destiny is to lose to Wales in the final.

I have always found it difficult to write about Apple? How do you make sense of a company that is so successful, yet fails to follow any of the increasingly accepted principles of openness and collaboration? Wired magazine had it just about right when it came up with the headline: “How Apple got everything right by doing everything wrong.” In Crowdsurfing, which I co-wrote with David Brain, we decided that it should be considered as an exception to the rule, which might have been something of a cop-out, but we received some support for this view from The Sunday Times’ Bryan Appleyard, who wrote, in a review of a biography of Steve Jobs, that: “Most of these (the lessons from Steve) are harmless, but ‘Be a despot’ (“It’s okay to be an asshole, as long as you’re passionate about it”) and ‘Don’t listen to your customers’ might well prove fatal in the wrong hands. In fact, I’m pretty sure that any company that wasn’t run by Jobs pursuing these tips would be brought to its knees in a fortnight. Jobs’ Apple is not a repeatable formula because Jobs’ isn’t.”

If you have a messianic figurehead like Jobs, a design genius in Jonathan Ive, complete control of the product value chain (what technology commentator John Naughton calls “the toll gate through which everything flows” ) and are enjoying an unparalleled hit-rate when it comes to new product launches, you can adopt Apple’s tight and hyper controlled approach. If not, and even Apple has now lost one of these fundamental pillars that made it unique, it is not a replicable model. Life after Jobs is likely to see Apple becoming less willing to defy conventional wisdom and accepted practice. It will become a more normal company, which will make it easier to replicate, but less easy to worship.

There is an accepted principle in theatre-land that the professional critics don’t formally review a performance until all of the teething problems have been ironed out. Unfortunately, the amateur critics refuse to follow this convention, so reviews of Love Never Dies began to appear within hours of the opening performance. The professional critics joined the debate in an attempt to defend the primacy of their viewpoint compared to the uninformed opinions of bloggers, although their argument was somewhat undermined when it was discovered that a pun repeated by a number of eminent critics – ‘Paint never dries’ – actually originated from one of the amateur commentators.

Veteran critic Michael Coveney spoke for many in his profession when he suggested that, ‘Everyone is entitled to their opinion but it is not criticism.’ In his Guardian theatre blog David Cote made a typically valiant defence of his profession, even if the metaphor he used was rather untheatrical: ‘We critics, reviewers, consumer reporters – call us what you will – are the dung beetles of culture. We consume excrement, enriching the soil and protecting livestock from bacterial infection in the process. We are intrinsic to the theatre ecology. Eliminate us at your peril.’ There is little doubt that the dung beetles are fighting a losing battle against this type of evolutionary process.

To his credit, the Independent’s Lister appears very relaxed by ‘the democratisation of criticism’, suggesting that theatre billboards will increasingly feature positive blogs and tweets as well as the opinions of experts such as himself, although he doesn’t discuss where this leaves the professional critic. The fact that Variety magazine in the US has already dispensed with its chief film and theatre critics might indicate that his generation could be the last to wear the mantle of the professional critic.

Compared to the hyper-speed of social media communication, most institutions are tortuously slow, weighed down by layers of bureaucracy, management cultures that don’t trust people to make decisions, pedantic legal advisers and self-serving control freaks in their public relations departments.  Expecting these businesses to be able to respond in real time to a tweet or a comment on Facebook is, at the moment, completely unrealistic. Equally, you still have companies taking five days to approve a corporate press statement, so to allow their employees to take part in a real time, unscripted and unedited conversation with customers online is going to require a huge cultural shift in the way that they work.

So rather than focus on the “three Ts” of social media – technology, tactics and trivia – organisations should first look at their culture and organisational structure: they need to loosen up.  Get this right and the Tweets will look after themselves.

It was fascinating to observe the progress of Team Sky during last summer’s Tour de France. The expensively assembled team, under the leadership of Dave Brailsford, is following the template used by Brailsford to transform the performance of Britain’s track cycling team from also-rans to the best in the world. His meticulous attention to detail and belief in ‘the aggregation of marginal gains’ (the idea that even small improvements to every facet of the team’s preparation will ultimately make a difference to its performance) played a critical factor in Britain’s domination of the velodrome during the Beijing Olympics.

Brailsford and the rest of his colleagues at Team Sky are using this same approach in a bid to win the ultimate prize in cycling, the Tour de France, by 2014. During the races, nothing is left to chance. The team use their own mattresses, pillows and duvets during their overnight hotel stops to prevent the riders suffering allergic reactions. Team briefings at the beginning of each race day take the form of PowerPoint presentations, rather than the informal discussions used by the other race teams. The team bus offers the ultimate in rider comfort, including a lighting system that can be adjusted to match the riders’ mood. The drinks bottles handed out during the race have different electrolyte mixes for each rider because they sweat in different ways. Even the team leaders admit that they are sometimes guilty of excessive analysis, but nothing will be compromised in the pursuit of excellence.

It would be fair to say that Team Sky’s debut in the Tour did not go to plan. Despite the meticulous preparation and attention to detail, the team’s riders struggled in what must be the world’s most brutal sporting event. It would be unfair to criticize Brailsford and his team right at the start of their five-year mission to win the Tour – especially given his track record – but it will be interesting to observe whether a strategy that works perfectly in the highly controllable conditions of the velodrome can work equally well in the unpredictable environment of the Tour. In the velodrome there are relatively few factors beyond the control of the team directors, other than the performance of their rivals. On the road, however, the teams have to be able to cope with the unexpected – the spectacular crash, interference from spectators and sudden changes of climate. As well as being highly organized, it requires the riders to be able to improvise and respond to situations as they arise.

The former international cricketer Ed Smith, in What Sport Tells Us About Life, claims that, ‘many of the most inspired sporting achievements, like great works of art or innovation, spring from parts of our personalities which resist rational analysis, let alone planning.’ He compares the type of professionalism exhibited by Team Sky, which ‘likes to think it is in control – that it has got a work ethic, a clear process and a precise system’, with the ‘childlike freedom and instinctiveness’ of amateurism. He quotes Brazilian football manager Felipe Scolari, when he was still living off Brazil’s success in the 2002 World Cup, rather than struggling at Chelsea: ‘My priority is to ensure that players feel more amateur than professional … we have to revert to urging players to like the game, love it, do it with joy.’

Rugby Union is a relatively complex sport and, to the uninformed, the activity on the pitch can look bewilderingly chaotic. Rugby coaches rely on repetitive drills to help players work together more effectively as a unit. In a similar way to the drilling of troops for battle, endless hours are spent on the training ground practising set plays. The aim is that every player knows what is expected of him in a particular situation and can act, almost without thinking. A rugby lineout, for example, requires the thrower of the ball, the catcher and the people lifting him to be in perfect harmony, which can only happen after hours of practice –and in the case of the Welsh team that I follow, not even then.

Without an organizing framework at the heart of every rugby team, it would simply degenerate into chaos. But the truly successful teams need something more than this framework, otherwise they risk becoming too predictable. Set plays, rehearsed in the artificial environment of the training ground, often without any opposition, all too often break down in the real match situation. The more enlightened coaches therefore talk about the need for ‘heads up rugby’ or ‘playing the game in front of you’. What they mean is that players have to be able to make decisions in the heat of the action on the pitch, rather than always follow pre-programmed moves. This is a perfect example of freedom within a framework. But it takes a great deal of hard work and inspiration to get players to actually deliver ‘heads up rugby’. They have to be given the skills and confidence to judge situations, make decisions and take calculated risks. The legendary Scottish coach Jim Greenwood, who virtually invented modern rugby coaching, described it as ‘well-judged risk-taking’, which is probably as good a definition of the art of management as you will find in any business book.