I've said it before, as have many others - obtrusion, advertising, and reduced utility will kill <i>every</i> 'social network' until the end of time that uses the Facebook/MySpace model.<p>The same doesn't hold true for Google. Search makes up an inordinate percentage of their revenue compared to development effort, it seems, and this drives a lot of internal innovation, some of which has worked and some of which hasn't.<p>This article is all over the place. The conclusion: "...Facebook and Google don't understand either social networking or advertising..." <i>might</i> be true for Facebook (with regards to advertising), but certainly isn't true for Google. Facebook will be able to buy the advertising chops, and Google's problem with social is they're trying to do social Google's way, but they can afford a few more false starts before they get it to work.