I don't find the conclusion of  a recent survey by  Jupiter Research  that surprising. Why would recommendations  from people that are just cutting and pasting an advert lead to a change in my purchasing  decisions? Not like my friend used the product ( I'm assuming it's not  music/ media)   all they did was pass on something for free that took < 4 second... yep that's a commitment that would really influence me.

   Onto more tangible things such as  phones Who are you going to trust?  A friend that has a new phone every year or one that's unboxing a new model daily?   What's interesting as the article points out is that the money , the "smart" money was all heading into social networks. Problem that I see with the research is the potential, that  the article hints at,  that most people don't really recognise what a blog is, most social networks let you blog, and the truth could be even more dire for social networks.  


Study: When it comes to influence, bloggers beat friend lists | The Social - CNET News

Half of all those surveyed who identify as "blog readers" (people who read more than one blog per month, a fifth of total survey respondents) say that blogs are important to them when it comes to making purchasing decisions. But they don't necessarily find them to be all that reliable: only 15 percent of blog readers, and five percent of all those surveyed said that in the past year they had trusted a blog to help them make a purchase decision.

That's still higher than the number of people who said they used social-network recommendations...