Another recent online power grab involves Facebook’s changes in privacy SEO. Most of the information gathered in social networking is used to improve the relevancy of advertising presented to you (be it behavioral or retargeting).

Yet Facebook’s recent changes in layout and linking unveil an even more ambitious plan. They want to become a hub for all brands, products, and artists on the web.

It’s true that you can hide all of your fan pages in green that fit into Facebook’s pigeon holes of activities, interests, movies, books, or music. There’s a good chance that most listings here will have their own fan pages, except for books which should list authors instead.

(Mark’s profile information that is publicly available; the interests in green can be hidden but the section in yellow must be visible to everyone, even outside of Facebook, if your settings allow visibility in search engines)

However, when you log in, you can discover some interesting user experience decisions that determine the data displayed above.

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Readers of my last post no doubt expected that I would write about HP and Palm next. I applaud the move for reasons I will explain later, but for now I want to talk about something perhaps more important: privacy.

Some people want to share absolutely everything online. The Foursquare satire, Please Rob Me, and heavily funded startup, Blippy, have shown that doing so is not always a good idea. Some Blippy members’ credit and debit card numbers were published to the world in Google search results. The privacy breach continued even after a supposed fix. Whoops.

(Credit card numbers in search results — every webmaster’s worst nightmare and every thief’s dream)

Before you call me a Luddite, I should say that I love social networking sites as long as I retain control over who sees what. Of course Blippy’s problem was due to a lapse in security, but it never would have happened if users had chose not to discard their privacy by volunteering their credit card numbers in the first place. And lest you ask, Blippy is different than a typical eCommerce site because its raison d’être is the overexposure of sharing shopping behavior.

I think there needs to be a little more common sense from consumers and independent analysis in the online industry. It should not require FTC investigations or Congressional oversight, as was suggested after Google Buzz complaints (warning, contains justified profanity). It means the fourth estate doing their job.

For instance, despite the backlash against Google Buzz, initial concerns about Google Social Search have all but disappeared.

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Quick! Which major cell phone manufacturer has performed the worst over the past two years in the stock market? If you have been reading business or technology publications lately, you would probably guess Palm. You’d be wrong. They are actually outperforming their non-Apple competitors Nokia, Motorola, RIM, and HTC (Source: Google Finance).

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Prospective clients often ask me how you can prove there is a potential for improvement when there are countless competitors or seemingly no room for growth. This is particularly important to the field of search engine optimization (SEO), which some feel is harder to forecast than advertising. My mentor, Mike Levin, often talks about how there is a finite number of searches happening everyday. You might be able to slightly influence that level through publicity, but generally marketers all fight over the same piece of the pie in their industry.

(Shigeru Miyamoto holding a Nintendo Wiimote, photo from Sklathill)

But what if you could grow the pie instead? The Nintendo Wii is one of the most famous case studies for this very idea. Miyamoto-san looked outside of the current market and connected with a non-traditional audience. Now more people are playing games than ever before.

How can you visualize that latent potential?

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