still wonder why google still not acquiring FB.

“Well, Facebook is now considered an old hand at the social networking game. Someone like Kevin Marks could try to lend a hand to other growth areas not directly connected to anything social, such as FreeBSD development, the Art of Illusion rendering/animation freeware, the Platinum Arts Sandbox gaming engine and one of the several Mini Linux distributions.”

Er, yeah but Facebook has options that are worth $m’s (or, at least, they think so). Where as working on FreeBSD, not so much.

And then on the cost side, the infrastructure costs for serving aggregate search content allows for all sorts of caching and optimization strategies. And yet for social media the infrastructure costs benefit from little of that leverage because of the uniqueness of the content involved.

Lower revenues + higher costs = much less profitable business for Google to be in.

To a degree, Google has gotten social networking right with YouTube, but every time the Google office tries to enter its input the whole site quakes of mercenary lunacy. They need a better approach, perhaps, but it could start with a better image of how they handle their ownerships.

I’ve also heard that a number of the ‘leading’ tech/dev players at MySpace (who didn’t face the axe because of their standing in the company) are also in transition up from LA/down from Seattle into the new FB campus.

Can you prod Kevin further on this?
If Google bucks the social web and ALSO plans to launch Wave email collaborating tools, do they plan to charge and/or monitor people when they join up in new ways that instantly feel as natural and necessary as wearing belly buttons? The timing of his departure would suggest so and it would be really good to know, before we all get ourselves attached.