"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
To extend your argument, you make money on it the same way as you do for those things that have been around forever. For jobs and dating, listing fees. For search, search marketing. And using the social graph to better target ads should increase CPMs by much more than content-based targeting.
I agree that social science is different from the physical sciences, but that's not an excuse for the cargo cult science that dominates the field. Read Historians' Fallacies for a view of how the social sciences should approach their work. (http://www.amazon.com/Historians-Fallacies-Toward-Historical...).