It seems that a lot of people have noticed that the practice of gaining linkbacks from social networks are not improving placement in search engines.

SEO anti-terrorism software by search engine companies is now starting to exclude links on many popular websites because they have been known to alter ranks.

In response many social network sites have added nofollow to links to limit bots.

This practice is very similar to previous linkfarms that were use to modify rank.

For this reason it seems that any effort to distribute links through social networking should be limited to actuall human visits.

If you have links that bots will ignore then the time expended to generate them is only worth it if actual humans will use the link to visit your site.

So is this the end of the usefulness of Social Networks for businesses, artists and websites that use them to attract visitors?

Its hard to say but things are changing.