I was moved by a recent blog post by Clara Shih titled, titled “Social Showdown: Google vs. Facebook” who in my mind is one of those real though leaders in the social media space.

What I find interesting and challenging for Google as they attempt to enter the social media space is about spread of the social graph amongst users that are looking for choice.  Even though Google has 176M users of Gmail, Facebook is ~400M  strong as a user base, with many of them using Gmail as a subset to their Facebook accounts.   I thought with the release of Wave, Google was positioning itself out of the box from its own services to have an agnostic service that could eventually spread to all users.  What makes Facebook so powerful ( in my mind) is that it can exist with many other products as a connector.  Once you build something into an existing product, I find it pigeon-holes you into the users of that service and in many ways you can fall victim to your own boundaries.  This has been a very complicated position for many years when I was at Nokia.   Even when many services were launched, they were mainly only for Nokia devices and it was a challenge for those services to also work across other devices to create that brand awareness that this existed.  This is my opinion, but I feel Social communication services should be agnostic to all services and devices and work as a form of connector of services.  How will Buzz work within a Google defined structure of Gmail vs. Facebook that is agnostic and a service that stands alone on its own right that now is getting positioned across all mobile operators and something complementary to your email, IM, etc…   In other words, I would say it would probably make more strategic sense for Facebook to incorporate the email service of your choice as opposed to try to create your own email service that again artificially creates a boundary of usage when users are comfortable with their own email service and email address to begin with.

I do believe that Google will find a very strong way to make Buzz a success, but being positioned in Gmail was something that might be limiting.  Any other thoughts out there?  Here is also a great presentation by Facebook Mobile at #MWC this past week.

Since the release of Google Buzz, I have been thinking quite a bit about usage cases of public and private ( even without the mobile usage case as this goes even to a different level).  In our daily lives we touch many different products that serve this kind of public/private usage case and have been an established behavior associated with them.  Our emails have a certain privacy shroud wrapped around them even though we may have conversations with people on many different levels….

Here is my first pass thoughts on why Buzz has opened the debate around Privacy.   It is not that Buzz is any different from the status box on Facebook and twitter, or even the one that Linked-in has added.  I think the real debate is about around the social behavior around privacy and the tools we use to manage our conversations.  Twitter exists on its own with the tools surrounding it as a certain usage case for many-to-many public discussions.  I would not think that I would want to include these types of communications in the inbox of my email, but Twitter has in fact done so with SMS and Text messaging that has been private.

I am still trying to figure out in my mind the ethos of social behavior and the tools we use, but email and twitter seem to be on completely opposite sides of my social communication graph.

With the recent rumours of Facebook launching a mobile advertising platform this year for the 100M mobile uniques and a recent article by Robert Scoble about “Supertweets” as a business model for Twitter in the advertising world, we are finally about to see a real explosion in social media advertising.  In addition with the announcement today of  Ex-Googler Tom Phillips to join Media6Degrees as CEO indicates the massive shift of talent into the space of social media  that is about to begin.

I spent the summer of 2007 working on this business model of influencers in the social graph of communities, and the real value of “WOM” in a digital form is finally taking root via social networks.  The challenges still remain around how to associate a brand in the user-generated content of conversations, but with the right platform and analytics, getting the community to back a brand and support it can be quite powerful.   This is an exciting time for social media platforms and I am looking forward to the next couple months of annoucements and the real indications of media budgets moving to social media platforms.

Although my Facebook account was down for 24 hours yesterday due to the Group Hack,  if my calculations are correct, in the next couple of days Facebook will announce the break-through of over 100M mobile users.  About a month ago in my discussions with Facebook staff,  I heard that they had over 65 M Mobile users and they they were expanding about 1M new users per day…… Therefore, I would imagine anyday now they will announce the 100M users and launch their mobile ad platform and the mobile open API.  Couldn’t be better timing then right around Thanks-giving  and the end of the year Christmas sales.  Great time for advertising.

Last year on Dec 12, at 3:27  they announced the 100M users on Facebook.  It is incredible that in less then 1 year ( if they do hit the mark and announce it) they could repeat this with Mobile.  This is an exciting time as it is the first service that has broke through the 100M user mark in Mobile outside of China.