Here’s a collection of fairly profound stats from a presentation given recently by social media guru Louis Gray. These select items show those of us in education where businesses are focusing their attention and the skills needed by modern graduates.

With the release of Google Buzz, there’s oodles of speculation at what Google is aiming for. Facebook’s popularity is soaring, and now they’ve announced they’ll be launching a webmail product to compete with Gmail. So, is Google threatened by Facebook? Heck yea!

The social media wars are heating up! Google already has a humongous user base, and Buzz automatically links into existing Gmail contacts, giving people an instant social network. How well the mass of non-tech Gmail users will take to Buzz remains to be seen, they might find it one to many improvements to an already great product. And whether or not those who’ve already invested time and sweat into Twitter and Facebook will consider switching? Only time will tell… but it’s bound to be an exciting 2010.

Many of our more venerable educators, administrators, and board members think that Social Networking (aka Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) is a fad of sorts. They are surprised when I tell them these should be integrated into their curricula. When they ask why, I tell them that companies are hiring people who know how to properly use these tools.

Since many of them often don’t believe me, here’s a “real world” example:

After we lost all our belongings in a house fire over the summer, and winter has rolled around, I find I have no winter boots. So I send out a casual post to my social network:

When I make a post it gets delivered to everyone who is “following” me (both on Twitter and Facebook). So about 800 people were able to see my note about the new snow in Juneau. One of them replied:

To which I replied:

And now things get interesting. Because Twitter is an open social network, you can tune in to public conversations. You can even save search results so that you’ll be notified whenever a key word appears. This is what smart businesses do. They monitor the social stream for mentions of their brand, so they can stay in touch with their community.

I was surprised, and impressed, to see that Zappos noticed my post and sent me a nice reply. Zappos is a great online store, and they prove it by being savvy enough to tune into the public Twitter stream. They even gave me a nice smiley face =).

But that’s not where the story ends. Later that night I finally selected the boots I wanted to try and placed the order. After I did so I replied to @Zappos_Service:

And they responded with a nice, personal message:

But they’re not the only savvy company monitoring the stream, because this morning I got this message, also with a nice smiley face:

The interaction with not only the vendor, but the manufacturer of the boots was a great experience for me. It solidified my faith in both brands and gives me the feeling that they’re not just faceless corporations but people wanting to connect with customers. This feeling makes me happy, and those companies know it’s a worthy investment because a happy customer is a repeat customer.

So if you are surprised when you learn that companies are hiring people with social networking skills, don’t be.

Not long after FriendFeed went live with realtime social networking they rolled out a feature that lets you search and subscribe to the Twitter followers of any Twitter user.

Naturally I used this for my own Twitter username first. But then I discovered it works for pretty much any username. So I decided to give it a real test. Here’s how I created a FriendFeed list called “Scoble’s Minions”, and subsequently got locked out of FriendFeed.

First, in FriendFeed go to http://friendfeed.com/friends. Click the Twitter button and enter the Twitter username whose friends you want to search for.

After a good while of the spinning progress circle I’m given a screen where I can select which folks I want to subscribe to:

And the list I want to put them in:

Warnings, Caveats, Etc:

• First of all, I have no idea why anyone would want to do this with a user like Robert Scoble, unless you want to introduce a ridiculous amount of noise to your stream or if (like me) you’re just playing around.
• Keep in mind while it adds the users with open feeds to the list you create, it sends a request to those with private feeds. When they accept, it will automatically put them in your Home feed. For me this was a little annoying since my Home feed is tuned to just have the people I want in it. So I had to do some cleanup.
• I’ve noticed a SIGNIFICANT change in the speed of the Add/remove friends screens in FriendFeed, especially when editing friends on my Home feed list. In fact it became nearly impossible to remove people from my Home feed. I sent Robert a DM asking if he has similiar slowness.
• I wonder if doing this can be considered abuse? Perhaps FriendFeed didn’t intend it to be used this way. I’m not sure.

One thing that is for sure, after enough banging around FriendFeed became downright non-responsive. Looks like they’ve blocked the IP address I was using during all my testing of this. Oops!:

UPDATE: My IP is no longer blocked by FriendFeed.

Facebook recently launched a new homepage layout along with some key feature changes. Namely, they’re taking down the garden walls and giving users the opportunity to network outside the website. Problem is, few of the “normal” users like it.

On the web today there’s a hip social media crowd that everyone “follows” (via Twitter and otherwise). These trend setters (visionaries?) go to all the rad modern conferences, push the limits of traditional business models, evangelize open and social content, and generally vocalize the direction the social web is (should be?) taking. Investors, executives, educators, and otherwise interested/integral people pay attention to this crowd in hopes of staying on the cutting edge.

Recently launched Facebook Connect enables regular websites to let people sign-in and network using their Facebook account. A similar service, launched around the same time, called Google Connect, does the same thing. This is an important milestone, and Facebook and Google obviously believe there’s significant business to be had by owning the service that socially-enables people’s individual blogs.

Most companies dealing in post-Web2.0 technology understand that community is commodity, and by being the platform upon which people build their community you stand a chance to become the next household name.

Prior to March ‘09, one of the criticisms of Facebook amongst the “in” crowd was that it was a walled garden. Unlike Twitter, Facebook profiles are protected and users must approve new “friends.” The interface and feature set were such that it was very easy to get up and networking in minutes. The “traditional” Facebook layout was so usable, even your mom could use. And she does! The Facebook philosophy was use your real name, and network with people you actually know. Twitter, on the other hand, lets anyone follow anyone, resulting in many one directional relationships: you may be listening to the tweets of people who aren’t hearing yours.

The original Facebook was an inspired work, which came out of the creative minds of a few very smart developers. It wasn’t a proven business case. The most recent evolution of Facebook isn’t so much a creative work but a business decision designed to change the fundamental philosophy of the site. You can now open your updates to be visible by anyone, and the homepage view is much more Twitter-like, in that the first thing you see is a stream of updates from people in your network. Indeed, Facebook now posesses the best of Twitter, FriendFeed, and most other social sites, including a huge user base made up of not only tech-forward but regular users.

The problem is, regular Facebook users don’t get the significance of this change. The old setup was just fine for their needs, and they don’t see any reason to change it. Unlike Twitter users who tend to be more social-web savvy, most Facebook users are just trying to share pictures with their family and friends. And most of them do not like the new Facebook:

So, the question now is, will Facebook continue in the direction set by the tech-forward minority, or will they build in legacy functionality to cater to the overwhelming majority who didn’t think it was broke and don’t understand why it’s being fixed.

Further Reading: The Scobleizer made a post with further/similar information: Why Facebook has never listened and why it won’t start now. And an opposing opinion over on The Guidewire Facebook Jumps the Shark.