Lazar, valid point that those social platforms nofollow, but I didn’t say they were source of juice-passing links; the keyword here is “visiblity”, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Google.

One of my clients, for example, isn’t too keen on advertising on Trulia.com because links on that site doesn’t flow alot of PageRank, if any. Meanwhile, his main competitor has property listings plastered all over that site, including banner ads (because she’s on Trulia’s board of advisors?) and featured listings. On every platform you want to match your competitor’s coverage at the very least. Fixating on Google and juice-passing links can be a distraction.

Actually, you are wrong here for one (or two) reason (by organic I mean link without nofollow):

before these social bookmarking services, people would link to good sites from their web sites and blogs, but since now it is more convenient to use social bookmarks AND BLOGS, people link less from web pages. Before the year of NoFollow, that was fine, but now, BY DEFAULT, almost all these sites AND BLOG PLATFORMS use nofollow, and therefore, all those links are valuable only for traffic, but not for SERP’s and Google rankings (i will ignore here the fact that Google may be considering social site popularity of links for the ranking).

If nofollow was a standard tag, and in w3shools.com tutorial (for example), more people and webmasters would know about it, but since it is not the case, there is an artificial PageRank inbalance.

Cheers

ps. nofollow is not about preventing spam, but getting higher on SERP’s

2 examples:
http://freshmeat.net/~regit/
go to authors pages (you know, those people that contribute weeks of their work to the site)

http://www.youtube.com/JackDanyells
same story, people make videos, invest time and creativity, and yet, they are not rewarded with nospam links to their homepages. since youtube is google company, there can be no confusion about the effect and purpose of nofollow

Maybe 10 years from now, Google’s algo will be 10% links, 90% on-page content. If Google’s present over-reliance on linkage data is evil (I don’t think so), its a necessary, unavoidable evil, at least for now.

If Google cranked down the PageRank knob to get more pages into the main index, I’m sure the same people will bitch about getting buried in spam. Believe it or not, Google’s made it harder for spammers to spam. Before Big Daddy, duplicate content was spammers’ only enemy.

In my experience *any* site with legitimate content can and will get links if the content is worthwhile. If your site is in such a niche that hardly anyone exists who can link to you (with value) then everyone else in that niche is going to have the same problem anyway - so the playing field is level again.

It’s just like “real-life” — without recommendations and/or promotion, nobody will know about your “better mouse-trap”. It might be the best in the world, but by telling nobody about it, it will never get featured in the NY-Times. And even then, the “best” does not always end up on top: think Betamax vs VHS.

Like you said, it is not going to change anytime soon, no amount of ranting will make anything else possible. To think of all the links that could be gained in the time that some people use to rant …….