We have all settled in a bit and have felt the war on mobile is basically the OS war between Google Android and iOS.  As Apple prep’s to make their announcements this coming October with iPhone 5, it is not serendipitous that Facebook is looking to make an announcement 2 weeks prior.  Over the last 5 years there has been a massive shift in behavior online to social.   The Google and Apple fight seemed to pass by Nokia without even a battle.  Nokia abandoning Symbian has now embraced the old online incumbent Microsoft with the Win7 platform as their next generation strategy of smartphones.  In my mind, this was such a strange decision as there was so much opportunity still to focus as a first priority with Meego, and not throw the “baby out with the dishwater” in the panic attack to enter the market again Google ( now Google-Motorola) and Apple.

However, I think the game could have been played out much differently if Nokia kept to its guns and supported Meego first and foremost with these two major strategies moving forward.

1) Web OS  ( getting rid of all native Apps for an HTML5 Responsive based ecosystem first)  *More on this in future posts

2) Taking a bolt step with Facebook, to make Meego the right open-source lower level  architecture with UI integration, and working with Facebook as the entire Application level OS as a strategy.   This thinking would be very US focused, but a plan nevertheless for a global competitive position for the next generation Social OS.

Instead of trying to develop an OS to compete with Apple and Google, give a strong ownership position of the Meego OS over to Facebook.   Not only has Facebook been the #1 App of choice across Android and iPhone, given the fact that mobile has always been about communicating and sharing ( the core DNA of a mobile device to begin with)  partnering with a company like Facebook at that strategic level several years ago would had been a unique position for even the likes of Nokia to bridge to the next shift in the future of mobility and just about everything- Social.   I am convinced the next generations of OS will be a Social Operating System, and there is no better then Facebook to make that happen when Nokia was the #1 in Smart phones several years ago.   We are seeing Google come back into the game with Google+ that in my mind will be the core to Android devices in the future.

With Nokia now dependent on Microsoft and Win7 now to drive the strategy, how will this be an advantage? Especially since with Social as a core strategy, it does not leave Nokia with much.   The right relationship with Facebook, would had been a strategy that could had given users the best position for this next wave.

Now that Facebook will be potentially launching Spartan at F8, It seems like that ship has left that station now even for Nokia, and the future opportunity to grab the “bull by the horns” with the next generation OS might now just be a drawn playing card.

I am excited to see what Facebook announces this week at F8 as well as the future of SPARTAN.    I have been a big believer in the future of the Web standards of HTML for the future of applications and connectivity cross-media.   Having a platform that works cross-mobile, online, tablet and social with HTML5 is an exciting future to be laid out with the Social Media OS.

Although, maybe Facebook will do this on its own? Have they enticed Device Manufacturers to join the camp such as HTC, Samsung, and others that are now looking for other options since the Motorola Acquisition by Google?  Nokia is still sitting in a good position with its patents, that the Nokia-Facebook Alliance ( even the Blue-Logo’s and the Connecting People expression make sense together) would make sense?  Could we even see Facebook buying Nokia before Microsoft does? That would be an interesting twist of events.

In any event these are all just thoughts that came to my mind before Facebook’s big F8 event on Thurs…. Here is also a modified Comscore chart with Facebook added.

Here is some good commentary on the “Social Media Wars” on ABCnews

Well, there is not a lack of news about the Middle East these days. China is a challenge as they grow their own competitors to Facebook….. so my gut tells me that the “Arab Spring movement” should be an important convergence that will be a continued asset for Facebook. How about South East Asia or the Africa region. This will require more and more strategies around mobile and possibly some acquisition targets for Facebook to keep getting users.

In any event, this is a big day for the Facebook team. A big congrats at getting to this next level.

As I was on Facebook quite early, I was able to bring a lot of my friends into my space. When I first joined I valued Facebook as a very private area to share information.  However overtime, I opened up to accepting less intimate friends, more business colleagues and light-relationships as well.   This definitely changed my style of  posts to more non-private discussions.

Here is a chart that shows how the privacy setting were from 2005 to April 2010.  For the information that you add to any of these areas,  it may be shared if you are not careful.  In many ways, they have also changed the privacy settings with new releases, that might have not caught your attention to the new access availability.

My 10 rules of thumb for using Facebook

1. when you post something, take the perspective that the entire world could see it anyway, anytime in the future.  i.e like when you recommend a restaurant to a stranger  ( the Definition of a Friend on Facebook may be different then a real life Friend)
2. Thinks that may help you or your business are good to post on Facebook. Leverage the viral nature as a business tool between you and your friends.
3. If somebody pastes something personal about you, you do not like, delete it and then send a private message to explain way!
4. If you do create controversial discussions, please note that these will always be there and may haunt you some day.
5. Becareful with your birthday, and contact information as they are the only two things that they keep between you and your friends
6. As Facebook adds location information, be especially careful.
7. All of your pictures will potentially become public and owned by Facebook, so becareful
8. Your “likes” will be shared, it is now part of the social web as Facebook calls it, so only “like” something if you want it shared
9. Facebook is becoming a very powerful search engine, so use it that way and to get advice on things that you are looking for
10. Throw in about 10~20% of your posts some kind of humor…..so then it makes it unclear if you really meant that or not?

These charts are from Matt Mckeon.  I have not done the research to check if these are accurate, so I am quoting him and you can go directly to his site.  I just thought this was a very interesting thing to share….. and “liked” the visual very much.

This was my experience with the connectivity with CNN.

1)  First of all, when I was as the CNN site,  I noticed the Facebook Share Widget.

2) So then I clicked “Facebook Connect” and went through the series of processes to Connect

….. Facebook Connect in Action….

3) I then had the option to sign-up for the CNN network…. which I did and become fully connected between Facebook and CNN.

4)  So lets take this for a ride….. I noticed I could go to the page within CNN to see all the articles recommended by Friends

5)  ….Then I found an interesting article on “Smell Sensors”.   I  ”commented” like and left a comment.

6) That comment was automatically posted to my Wall ( News Stream)

Facebook has been successful in not only owning the user, but they do a great job in “viral marketing”.  Will this growth continue or will privacy kill them? Will they become the next Internet? Will they form that unique strategic partnership with Apple?  They are consistently going from country to country and becoming the underlining social graph.

However, there are countries that have not become dominated yet by Facebook.  Not only are they in the top of Apple’s portfolio of must downloaded applications, Mobile has been know to be a usage case of social media ( >50%).  Many strong mobile players such as Mocospace, AirG, Brightkite, Loopt, Gowalla, Foursquare keep on growing, but the shear volume of growth of Facebook is astounding.

Many companies have leveraged “Facebook Connect” as a way to build there usage base, and they seem unstoppable.  Bebo is up for sale, and the other social networks are taking on a completely new business models.   Even Twitter has not shown the growth yet as Facebook, and as Facebook has prided itself with Direct to the end-user, they can bring any kind of app as integrated into their platform and just crush the competition.  Location was launched recently in Facebook, but when are we going to see extravagant maps tied to the overall service.

As they say, “what goes up- must come down” so it will be interesting to see where they peak or will they just become the WWW…. or FFF.

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.

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.