(Source) Imagine if all the conversations on Facebook were fed through natural language interpreters in order to understand users’ likes and dislikes. Take this a step further and imagine if all of the users photos were fed through image interpreters to find commercial products. In theory, a system could be created sophisticated enough to identify the clothing brand of a person featured in an image, determine who is influenced by this person and use this information to market to specific targets. Think about the impact on a high-schooler who sees an ad delivered on Facebook featuring the beautiful cheerleader at his school with a Pepsi can in the background. This system could work equally well for co-workers, family members and significant others. The possibilities for ‘relationship driven advertising’ are practically endless.

This kind of system would enable companies to stop spending millions for a celebrity endorsement and start buying a guaranteed recommendation from an influencer of a potential buyer for a fraction of the cost.

Is this what Facebook is coming to? If so then you’ll have to forget everything you know about social marketing.

Yesterday, Search Engine Optimization Journal wrote a post predicting that search engines and social networking sites would integrate to revolutionize both search and social marketing. If SEOmoz is correct, we may be closer to that that we can imagine.

Of course, it won’t happen tomorrow. But Microsoft could be poised to take top traffic and marketshare from Google within five years. Unless Google develops its plan first. With Google partnering with MySpace, which is working hard to play catch up to Facebook, and Microsoft partnering with Facebook while working to play catch up to Google in the search arena, this fight could get really interesting.

There is a major shuffle going on right now in the search and the social marketing industries. Google is losing employees – key employees – fast. Facebook is acquiring them. Yahoo! is losing them. MySpace is tinkering in the background. Ask, of course, is just doing its own thing, and doing it fairly well. But unless Ask develops real social applications that appeal to the masses with the cashes, it won’t be a major player. It’s quite possible that within five years the search/social marketing industry will be dominated to two giants: GoogleSpace and MSNbook. That will be interesting to see.

On February 5, MySpace will be launching its developer platform. Following the lead of Facebook, it looks as if the social marketing site may have been taking some notes. They claim to have addressed some of the issues and found a way to avoid the pitfalls that other social networking sites have experienced.

One feature of the MySpace developer platform that looks really promising is its integration with OpenSocial, the joint venture project between MySpace and Google, which was announced late last year.

Adam Ostrow at Mashable actually talked to MySpace COO Amit Kapur and reports that MySpace is addressing privacy issues and spam with its developer platform. I for one am anxious to see how this develops.

At first glance, Prologue sounds like a cool tool. But you have to be using WordPress to get any value out of it. That’s not a bad thing.

Some folks are saying it will murder Twitter. That’s not likely to happen and Mike Bogle makes a good case. Nevertheless, I see a useful application of the theme.

First, Prologue is a theme, not a widget. Keep that in mind. And it’s WordPress.com, not dot org. That is a drawback because it means you’ll have to change your current WordPress theme if you want to use Prologue, and if you are using the WP software on your own domain name it isn’t available. If you like your current theme then you’ll have to give it up – ah, sacrifice! Otherwise, you’ll have to do without this unique social feature that takes WordPress.com to an entirely different level.

Personally, I’d like to see this as a WordPress widget for the dot org users.

To see what Prologue looks like, check out this demo blog.

On a personal note, didn’t this wii tennis player and member of the WordPress team sing that song about saving horses and riding cowboys?

StumbleUpon is one of the most popular social bookmarking and social networking sites online. There’s a good reason for this. It’s hard to classify SU as social bookmarking or social networking because it incorporates elements of both so well. I particularly like SUs toolbar, which gives users a one-click approach to voting for or against a site. If you like the site you just click the thumbs up icon. Don’t like it? Click the thumbs down button.

There are some downsides to StumbleUpon though. For instance, if you are the first person to vote on a site and you don’t like it then you can’t add it to the SU community. SU won’t let you. That’s a bummer. But I’ve recently discovered another weakness of the system, although my observation at this point is merely a hypothesis.

If you bookmark an entire blog – that is, the home page – then go back later and try to thumbs up a specific blog post, SU won’t let you. Click on the thumbs up button and you’ll get a gray thumb and no response. I believe this is because you’ve already shown that you like the entire site, therefore saying that you like a particular post is redundant. At least that’s the way SU sees it. For this reason, I recommend only voting for individual blog posts.

I wonder if anyone else has had this experience with StumbleUpon and if so, what did you do about it.

If you like sharing your photos, Flickr is a cool way to do that. There are some ways to use Flickr to network with others who like photos. But it’s also not all about photos.

Flickr is a social site that allows users to upload photos and other graphics and share them with each other. Like other social media sites, you can browse the photos of other people, vote on them if you like them, or against them if you don’t, comment on them, and even add the users to your friends list.

There are many different uses for Flickr, but one powerful way to use it is to store your photos so that you can hotlink to them from your blog. I’ve known several bloggers who use Flickr for that purpose. But you can also use Flickr to network with others who have blogs and enter into an agreement with them so that you can use each other’s photos on your blogs.

Through Flickr’s Creative Commons library, you can set the rules of use for all of your photos. You can reserve all rights or make your photos open domain. You can set your rights to anywhere in between. There are even social applications out there that allow you to write slideshows for your photos and show them on your website.

Flickr is a great way to make new friends and everything you can do there you can do for your business or for personal pleasure. I strongly recommend using Flickr as a networking tool.