Facebook’s recent announcement of a new marketing product that allows businesses to join Facebook and users to become their fans is according to Facebook representative the Holy Grail of marketing. Lets do a quick reality check to see why this may not be quite accurate.

First, for those who do not know or can’t see through the vast tooting on their part is that there is one basic function that Facebook allows the members to do. You interact almost exclusively with people you know in real life. In fact, your profile is visible to these people only. While you may argue there are various match making applications in Facebook those applications are certainly not the reason why people join Facebook to begin with. You join because you interact with the people you know already.

When the search engine popularity wars were on and Google won it did that because every other engine offered truckloads of features and content on the first screen. Google did not. They offered a box to type words in and a button to do the search. This is what people needed when they went to a search engine. No one did it because they were stuffed with random news, weather or stock quotes. All that is irrelevant and distracting you from access to the information you came looking for. Relevance? Google still works this way and there is little reason to change it. People expect that when they go to Google. When people go to Facebook they expect to interact with their friends.

Social Media has many interesting aspects to it that make it a huge player in consumer opinions. If you are thinking of buying a new product you may want to do a search to find what other people have to say. Facebook claims that this is true with their service. What makes a world of difference is that in other forms of Social Media the content gets published. You can find new people who write about the product that you do not necessarily know personally, but you can learn from their blogs if their preferences might be similar to yours. The blogs act as tools of digital identity that tell other people what kind of person is publishing the content. In Facebook there is really no need for building digital identity because your real life friends already know.

Why is published content important? To have a discussion you have to let everyone chip in who feels they have something to contribute to the subject matter. Does Facebook have discussions? Not really. It is not what you go there for. There are sad single thread comments in the group feature It is fair to say people might have better ways to find discussions on brands and products than browsing through a company’s facebook profile. Because Facebook is not intended for publishing the entire discussion feature is somewhat non existant in a Facebook users’ point of view and there is really no motivation for doing so. They are perfectly content playing games with their friends and occasionally posting funny pictures and videos on each other’s Funwalls.

So, why would a person sign up to become a fan of Sony Pictures, Inc? The benefits of doing so remain a mystery as rubbing advertising at your real life friends’ faces each time they log and see what you are doing does not seem enticing. You could pay people for advertising, but there seems to be no simple way to do it. Ads might tell random people something about you, but random people are not looking at your profile ever. What use is an endorsement when no one sees it or can not see why you endorsed the brand or what other products you like as well?

Of course, viral videos still work, but that is regardless of the so-called Social Ads. Rest of everything is more or less spam that users will continue to adblock like they have done so far. Facebook will probably monetize their service from a lot of companies who get lured into thinking the visibility of their marketing is a lot more than the basic premises of Facebook actually allow. Facebook could change their service but that might be a disastrous choice. None of this will ever change the user expecation of logging on and interacting with the real life friends.

Virgin Mobile in Australia is causing a stir with their ad campaign that reuses photos from Flickr. CNN reports of a person who is going to sue Virgin Mobile for using her picture in the ad campaign. It would be a good time for the Flickr users to pay attention to a feature that lets them select how they are publishing their photos. Technically the photos Virgin Mobile is using are all in the public domain as the users have opted not to apply a Creative Commons license that denies commercial use of their photos.

Don’t forget, things you publish become public. If you want some control over how your content may be reused take a moment to figure out what Creative Commons license is best for you.

To build awareness of Free Culture movement a collection of best free books, free movies, free audio and free software has been made available to download. This DVD shows what value free culture has to offer and many issues around it. Some excellent videos on it are Mix Tape, Who Owns Culture? and Trusted Computing. Lawrence Lessig’s book on how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity titled Free Culture provides an excellent view why Free Culture matters and why draconian copyrights destroy culture.

Recently the HD-DVD copy protection scheme was hacked and a 16-bit decryption key was published on a forum. This is very similar event when the DeCSS code was released that could decrypt the DVD encryption. The code was published on multiple sites within days and eventually ended up being printed on t-shirts and mugs. Now the time has come for the HD-DVD DRM to get hacked and the entertainment industry has gotten busy in trying to censor this key from the internet.

Will it be different this time as in United States the law has changed to prohibit releasing information that helps circumvent DRM? We will find out very soon. The social bookmarking site digg.com has decided to stop removing links to HD-DVD code on their site after their community completely overwhelmed attempts to remove the code from the site. Google currently knows of 57,800 different sites that contain the code ‘09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0′ and that number is growing rapidly by the hour.

The copyright laws are likely to go under pressure and this is bad news for business models that rely on DRM locking access to digital media. Now that troubled EMI has decided to make their content available without it looks as if rest of the music industry might follow. Ty Roberts, CTO of Gracenote recently said in a conference that the music industry was “about to cave in the next six months”.

This article does a great job detailing what kind of benefits consumers may experience when they upgrade their computers to Windows Vista. Are you Vista ready? No, thanks.

It’s not uncommon to find a lot of parents who think their kids do not need to use computers and can ‘learn those skills later’. What computer skills and internet represent to kids is likely to be substantially limited to these adults as playing violent video games and anti-social activity. Truth is, however, that the kids today grow in an environment where internet is a communications tool and facilitates many activities that take place in ‘meatspace’.

Back in the days before we had mobile phones or the internet the kids used to take up the only existing remote communications medium available at homes - the phone. Today that demanding need to be in contact with peers has been replaced by a far superior medium that scales in unimaginable ways - more simultaneous interaction between more people at greater distances. The options for human interaction is also more varied by subjects of a discussion as more niche interests become widely documented.

Compare that to the days when the parents were young. Limitations for interaction were limited in many ways to what was available at your location. Choices for hobbies were few if any and you got to play with the neighbor’s kids regardless how poorly your interests mixed. Even on television the lack of unfulfilled communication needs manifested themselves when Al Bundy cracks a sarcastic comment at Kelly about the time she spends on the phone.

Luddite parents? Tough.

There is a very insightful article on New York Magazine on a very important impact the social media has created. Parents often have romantic ideas of providing their kids an ideal innocent dream childhood. One that closely resembles their own, except the time has cleaned away any bad memories and painted everything in washed tones of color. The world however has moved on and taken a great leap with the internet. What parents do not get is that the kids dig it and define a world that is radically different to the one they grew up in.

“Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in something old people are not allowed to, it makes us bitter. What did we have? The mall and the parking lot of the 7-Eleven? It sucked to grow up when we did! And we’re mad about it now.”

It’s the end of privacy as we adults define it. We debate how we can control the new world and protect children. The real question is whether this cultural change can really be affected to begin with. Most adults are complete outsiders to it. The truth is that the control adults desire was lost long time ago. Adults should learn how to participate, be present and engage kids in our new world. Adults have to adapt to how the younger generation communicates.

We are in a dire need of social media that is useful and meaningful across the age spectrum.

Noka sells extremely expensive chocolate. The brand promise is based on exclusivity and purity of their product. And then this article came out on dallasfood.org questioning their misleading marketing and revealing how these products are actually created. Shortly after it was referred to on Boing Boing and the word-of-mouth quickly stormed on the internet.

It appears Noka hired a ‘crisis communication’ consultant who started posting on many discussion boards and blogs to defend Noka. Of course, his identity is discovered to total discredit of the Noka brand.

There are many things to learn here for the marketers. Deception in marketing has a high risk in today’s opinion-connected world.

Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007. Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers. Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007.

Gartner has posted some research on predictions for the future. The problem with this estimate is that the concept of ‘blog’ continues to develop over time and there are already a lot of similar forms of one-to-many communications taking place on the internet that is not tracked or considered a blog even though they serve the same purpose and have a similar form. If anything the need for communication has always existed and people will continue to embrace and use new ways of communication as long as it has a potential to reach more people than the traditional ones did. 100 million blogs only? Probably a lot more.

Here is a piece of good writing from Danah Boyd on social networks and how they model, or fail to, relationships between people. How can someone have over 10000 friends? Who are their best friends? Why people create fake identities? The real question is do the social networking sites actually work in the intended context at all.

The most common reasons for Friendship:

• Actual friends
• Acquaintances, family members, colleagues
• It would be socially inappropriate to say no because you know them
• Having lots of Friends makes you look popular
• It’s a way of indicating that you are a fan (of that person, band, product, etc.)
• Your list of Friends reveals who you are
• Their Profile is cool so being Friends makes you look cool
• Collecting Friends lets you see more people (Friendster)
• It’s the only way to see a private Profile (MySpace)
• Being Friends lets you see someone’s bulletins and their Friends-only blog posts (MySpace)
• You want them to see your bulletins, private Profile, private blog (MySpace)
• You can use your Friends list to find someone later
• It’s easier to say yes than no

Dig in for more nuggets here.