Fortune Article Outlines Social Networking Battle

Here's a very good article from Fortune on the competing strategies from social networking's big brands.

What I find most compelling is the idea that Facebook is aligning advertising with branded utility and word of mouth. An "application" serves as an advertising vehicle, but does so in a way that the user finds unobtrusive and worthy of sharing. As a Facebook user, I like this a lot.

It shows you can never rest if you are going to innovate. Google, which revolutionized advertising with highly contextual ads, is already seeing a dangerous competitor emerge. Hence the move to "Open Social," as this article notes.

It's an amazing time to be in this industry, as every day, thanks to these innovative companies, something new, fascinating and useful to humanity comes along. It will be very interesting to see how it all shakes out.