I happened to visit Facebook’s Business Solutions page, and was struck by how, at least on the surface, these advertising formats seem like exactly the kind of innovation that should be helping Facebook achieve Google-style revenue–which is, of course, what Facebook’s $15 billion valuation assumes will happen. And yet with 100 MILLION users, Facebook’s 2008 revenue was only projected to be $300 million.

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Why is Google making more money everyday while newspapers are making less? I’m going to pick on the Washington Post again only because it’s my local paper and this is a local example.

There were severe storms in the Washington area today, and the power went out in our Reston, Va., office. I wanted to find some information about the status of power outages to see whether we should go into the office tomorrow. Here’s what I found on the homepage of WashingtonPost.com:

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What’s wrong with the “friends connection” programs announced by Facebook, MySpace, and Google? Many people have been trying to explain the principle of data portability as if it were a new concept, but it’s actually not. It’s been on our PCs for years.

Think about the applications you use on your computer–the ones that run LOCALLY on your computer. They all produce files. You’ve got your word processor files, your spreadsheet files, your presentation files, your accounting software files. You create some data with the application, then save it to your drive. You can take those files and put them on any other computer and open them with any application that supports the file type.

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In the networked Web era, influentials may not be people with a particularly connected temperament or Rolodex, or people who control and influence monopoly distribution channels (e.g., newspapers), but rather people who influence the network by leveraging the most powerful force on the Web–the link. People like bloggers, top Diggers, power users, Facebook users who share lots of links, MySpace users who embed videos, Twitter users who post lots of URLs, or any social-network user with links to lots of friends.

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Google has been quietly rolling out social features across all of its services based on Gmail contacts. While Google still has to overcome some of its social tone-deafness (e.g. automatically adding contacts without asking), this move makes perfect sense. For people over 30 (and probably even over 25) email IS the social graph.

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