For a while, you’ve been able to make a physical book from your Facebook content. Now, see it in cinematic form. Intel partnered up with Japanese agency Projector to turn your Facebook profile into a short film in a microsite called Museum of Me. It pulls photos, status updates, video and comments to generate a beautiful visualization as if it were part of a museum installation. Quite clever and very high production quality. Definitely worth checking out. If only they made it available for export — onto your Facebook profile. Now that would be meta.

But a new and arguably simpler way of targeting ads using the social graph based your personal connections is proving to be more effective. Facebook has not only taken over Google’s lead in visitor traffic, but has very quickly become  fertile ground for advertisers to reach switched on prospects. In addition, they’ve been able to undercut other sites’ CPMs, going as low as $0.60 (compared with $2.50-$10 for competitors) making it even more attractive from an advertiser’s perspective.Google has been caught flat-footed in the social marketing space. Not only have they been unable to launch — and maintain — a social network, they seem to have adopted a build it and they will come approach to social computing. Their previous attempts (Orkut, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Wave, Buzz, Aardvark, etc.) have all fallen spectacularly short for myriad reasons. The one thing these failures have in common is a lack of real innovative utility that people actually care about. They were all either developed or acquired as “me too” approaches that lacked a specific Google point of view that resonated with regular people. Their latest “+1″ program looks to compete with Facebook “Like” button. Again, another me too approach that doesn’t significantly differentiate.

To help refocus the company, new CEO Larry Page announced that all Google employees’ bonuses would be directly linked to their success in social strategy. To some, this was a sign that Google has grown too big and lost its ability to deliver meaningful innovation. To me, it’s a carrot that they will be chasing for some time to come.

4/10/2011 Edit: Looks like Google’s Yelp competitor, Hotpot has just been rolled into Google Places. A -1 for Google.

On a good day, I take about 20 minutes to get ready for work each morning. Design student Alex Trimpe helps visualize what can happen on Facebook during those 20 minutes.

• 1M links shared
• 1.3M photos tagged
• 1.4M event invitations sent
• 1.8M status updates
• 1.8M wall posts
• 2.7M messages sent
• 10.2M comments made

I have clients who would be ecstatic to see those kinds of results over a campaign or even a year. And to think all of that happens before I head out the door.

Just how entrenched is Facebook globally? Social Hype and Online Schools collaborated on this infographic. More after the jump!

Email > Twitter > Facebook > Breakfast > RSS (on the go)

A few years ago, my email was the last thing I looked at before going to bed and the first thing I did when I woke up, often during breakfast. Fast forward to the present and now a bunch of “news” compete for my attention: email, RSS feeds, news sites, Twitter and Facebook updates and so on. Because the time-space continuum isn’t changing and I still need to rush out the door to work, there’s less and less time to cram all of this reading in.

As a result, the stuff that I actually read becomes shorter and shorter. While email is still my top priority as it probably is for many others, my priorities have shifted. I find I am more efficient when I compartmentalize my attention. It used to be that I’d login to Facebook on my computer but now, I simply scan status updates on my mobile. I used to catch up on RSS feeds through Google Reader, but now, I refresh them on the mobile and read them cached on the train to work. Most recently, I’m finding Twitter gaining in the attention competition. If one is judicious about who to follow, I believe it’s possible to get a timely pulse of what’s going on at a glance because the 140 character limit enforces efficiency and blends nicely with my morning caffeine spike. I am sure a couple of years from now, there will be something new that will shake things up.

What does your morning routine look like today?

The recent controversy over Facebook’s new terms of service (ToS) essentially gave them extraordinary power: “irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers)….” Yes, it’s lawyerspeak but it certainly doesn’t sound enticing to me or any potential new user.

Needless to say, the public balked and Facebook caved and went back to its previous ToS. Now, the company seems to be backing away from its authoritarian stance, taking a more democratic approach by inviting users to craft the privacy policy. In a way, this is somewhat akin to the government asking its citizens to rewrite its laws. The question now is, how can Facebook monetize its massive traffic in a way that its users can accept and what value will users get in return?