Zynga Poker

The International Federation of Poker broke the news some days ago, Zynga is officially recognized as the first Digital Federation in the history of sports. Zynga won’t run an official press release due to its pre-ipo condition.

In my humble opinion this is historic news. The digital world and internet know no-boundaries. Because individuals and users huddle around concepts, ideas or content, and they do so within frameworks of established companies and their apps and products to perform one activity or another, let it be sharing articles, opinions, status, news, blogging, watching videos or simply playing games, the world and its people, of their own accord, are re-distributing the globe in a new and fascinating way.

The world and its boundaries have historically been split and drawn by politicians and generals locked in rooms with rulers, pencils, cartographers and maps. In the same way that the internet landscape was visually arranged in the Web 2.0 summit graphics in Search or Networking related continents, its only logic to draw the mind sports landscape to include digital federations. In what it relates to poker, Zynga obviously is the biggest “digital poker country” in the world with its more than 35 million players  and 50 million fans via their Facebook app.

Its important to note that mind sports are those sports as recognized by IMSA (The International Mind Sports Association) thus by Sportaccord. They are Bridge, Chess, Go, Draughts, Chinese Chess and Poker.

Mind sports don’t necessarily require the physical presence of the sportsman where the game takes place, only his mind, being thus perfectly poised to become the future of sports in the technology age, their very own nature embracing the disaggregation of “physical and meta”, hence aligned with the dynamics and behavioral patterns of digital natives, such as poker going through the roof is clearly showing.

Bearing the above in mind, the world governing body of poker, the IFP, has recognized Zynga as the first digital federation in the history of sports.

Whilst its true that there are other tournaments, such as the WSOP, or the EPT, the only titles recognized by an official body within the international sporting community are those of the one and only governing body for the world of Poker, the IFP.

There are two events to be produced by the IFP in London between November 17^th and 20^th, the Duplicate Poker Nation’s Cup, and the individual poker world championship, named “The Table”.

The first one is a tournament where teams from 11 different nations plus Zynga; including the US, Japan, UK, Germany, Spain or Brazil will fight to win the right to call themselves the world cup winners. Zynga will be sending a team of 6 players plus a captain chosen via Zynga Poker in Facebook to the IFP Poker Nation’s Cup. It’ll be played in the iconic EDF London Eye, players sitting at tables inside the pods.

Beacuse the IFP aims at promoting Poker as a mind-sport and game of skill, and doesn’t do gambling, the Nation’s Cup will be a Duplicate Poker tournament. Duplicate Poker is an evolution from Duplicate Bridge, where the random element is minimised in the way in which cards are pre-shuffled and players play in teams where all end up playing the same hands by sitting in different table arrangements. Even though there have been some Duplicate Poker trial tournaments, such as the one that took place in Oxford University before summer, its the first time Duplicate Poker will be played in a tournament of this magnitude.

The second event, “The Table” is a free roll with US$500,000 in price money where the players that take part in the Nation’s Cup, as well as some other “Presidential Picks”, will compete to win the first official “Poker World Champion” title. This tournament gathers most of the strongest and best players in the world. It will be played in London’s County Hall.

The recognition of a brand as a digital federation, hence a digital nation, and its ranking with almost the same “federation” status as those of other countries, is unprecedented in the history of sports, and opens the door to the evolution of sports into the 21^st century.

In my opinion, the above is similar to when a black man first won an Olympic medal, someone decided to roll over his back to jump higher, a French man a long time ago decided to go back and retake sport competition formats from Ancient Greece, or Coca Cola decided to work in the 70′s with FIFA to turn soccer into the most popular sport in the world, in what has effectively become the largest sponsorship deal in history, crafted by the sports legend Patrick Nally.

We are witnessing the first official move to adapt sports to the Knowledge Society in a profound and significant way, which will in turn have a large impact down the road, influencing how individuals consume, enjoy and play sports. There will be many that oppose this breakthrough, it will show the typical tension between the Status Quo and the Innovator, but that’s ok, that’s what innovation is about.

I can only praise the IFP and its President, the remarkable author Anthony Holden, and the visionary behind it, the legendary founding father of sports marketing Patrick Nally for their boldness. Quoting Steve Jobs; “Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do”

Let the games begin!

Disclaimer: I’m a Director of Mind Sports Partners and its Chief Digital Officer. MSP is the exclusive rights holder of IFP

Francisco Gordillo. Madrid, November 2011

My God

This is a rough translation and cross posting of an original article written in my Spanish blog. You can find the original Here!

My God is not white, black or yellow. Need not be. In fact He is everything.

My God is the reflection of light in water, a white cloud against the blue sky, the cold blackness of infinite space, the starry night and the laughter of a child.

My God knows no gender, but the enjoyment of sharing my body with whom I want; to give and receive pleasure, to express my emotions, my ecstasy, my joy, to vent my frustrations, to make my fantasies and dreams come true. In fact my sex and its joy also are part of God.

My God is my freedom to believe in what I want, think what I want, go wherever and do whatever I want with respect for others.

My God does not live in any book, in the words of prophets, the testimonies of those who followed them, nor sculptures, paintings, drawings or carvings. There’s no need, He is God.

My God does not need buildings, physical locations from which to communicate with him, or translators to explain to me his intentions, since he lives in and around me. Why would He need them? He is I and I am part of Him.

My body and mind are the only cathedral, mosque, synagogue and temple.

My God never said a word, threw any message, instructed or ordered anything. Creation is His expression.

My God has no beard or saints, clothing or fear, herd or pack, no fallen or elevated. He’s neither young, old nor ageless. He neither punishes nor forgives. He doesn’t complain about anything nor anyone, He doesn’t have a good or bad opinion of me nor anyone. He doesn’t even think, no need, He just is. In fact He is everything.

My God does not need to break the laws of physics through miracles or spectacular actions to prove He exists. No need, He is God.

My God doesn’t believe I’m guilty of anything, does not distinguish between good and evil, between light and darkness, between strengths and weaknesses, for it’s all part of the universe, that is He, and therefore everything we consider good and evil has its reason for being. If they shouldn’t be so, they wouldn’t be.

I, like all mortals am full of pleasures and vices, of pure and crooked thoughts, inconsistencies, limits and dreams, thoughts and physical realities. And this is how it should be. If it shouldn’t be so, it wouldn’t be.

My God does not want me to understand nor believe in Him. He wants to me to feel him; in the eyes of my daughter, the orange sunsets, the scent of a flower, the song of a bird, the flying snowflake, the rustle of grass waving in the wind, the lonely and silent immensity of the mountains or in the still mirror of the lake.

My God does not live in the postcards of crying images, food prohibitions, pendants, chandeliers, parchments, old bones, differences in blood or stone statues.

My God created me with the ability to abstract and create worlds, situations, people, conversations, landscapes and images in my head. This is the true mystical sense of wonder, excitement, to connect with the beauty of the new, exploring the unfathomable infinity from the stronghold of the mind and heart.

My God created me with the intellectual and spiritual tools to humbly accept my insignificance, and my infinite importance within the overall context of things. My God filled me with love, for I’m essential for the universe to the extent that I am part of Him If not, I would not be.

I am part of God, as I am, and He is everything.

Francisco Gordillo. Rio de Janeiro. August 2011

The New Era

What’s happening in London and other UK cities are not riots. What’s happening in Port Au Prince, Syria, Yemen, Madrid, Libya, etc, are not protests nor revolutions. The world is witnessing the embryo of a global insurrection that’ll take place over the course of the upcoming years. This promises to change the way in which we live, work and communicate and is part of the pain of delivering the world into a new era.

The modern man has six basic fears; fear of poverty, fear of old age, fear to lose love, to critics, to ill-health and of course, fear of death. In the process of voting someone in an election, choosing a product or taking whatever decision in our lives, we overcome one of those basic fears as well as some minor ones such as the fear of the unknown.

However, those fears and the result of battling against them, the tools and strength of spirit used to overcome them, the needed support from peers, beloved and even strangers, not too long ago circumscribed themselves to the realm of the immediate, of the close, only being shared with the world by those individuals who had access to media. We now live in times of unprecedented change in the history of humankind whereby everyone can express themselves, and what’s more important their message, if understood by an audience can be acknowledged and eventually amplified.

The unrest spreading throughout the globe isn’t something new or spontaneous, it’s the result of the coming together of several major factors; increased awareness, lack of illusion, the death of capitalism and increased empathy.

Increased awareness as a result of the adoption by mainstream of real-time sophisticated bidirectional multipoint broadcasting systems, i.e; Twitter, Facebook, blogging and the like. Increased awareness derived from the analysis of more unfiltered, unbiased, non manipulated information, in the way we now don’t receive our news or “stimulae” through the looking-glass of some major corporation or government adept or run broadcasting company, i.e; CNN, BBC, et, etc…

The death of capitalism is, paradoxically enough, brought about by the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the Communist system, in the way capitalism, without finding a counterweight, went “all-in” and what before was a suitable deity to fight against the alienating communist maxima “we’re all the same, therefore we should all have the same”, money, no longer satisfies the needs of workers and citizens living in the knowledge society versus the ones from the industrial or post-industrial times.

The empathic civilization is a direct result of genetics, but also of the increase in direct information from “normal” people. In the process of putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we get closer to forming part of  super entity gaining consciousness of itself through identifying problems and the way to feel about them, through the aggregation of feelings and points of view of millions upon millions of beings. (I won’t go into the empathic civilisation now, but you can find Jereny Rifkin’s Theory video HERE)

The bottom line is that all these revolts and shows of disturbance come as the first skirmishes in the process of delivering a new era and hopefully a better world, where unjustness is rapidly shared with the world to condemn it, where action, relief and solidarity are overwhelming, massive and almost instantaneous as we saw in the case of Haiti, Japan or the Tsunami, where the theory of James Lovelock according to which the earth and all its inhabitants and matter are part of a coordinated supra-being called GAIA is closer to be acknowledged by all of us.

As a matter of fact, it’s not that we’re redrawing or reinventing the world in which we live in, its itself, as a result of our evolution as a civilization, the one which is redrawing the boundaries through an increase in our consciousness and awareness of all that surrounds us, let it be the environment, oppressive political systems or racism.

I have no doubt we move towards a new era where political, economic and social frameworks will be reinvented to suit a more natural human being than that resulting from the industrial revolution, and, as history has taught us via the collapse of precedent civilizations, the decay of the former way of living will become the fertilizer for the growth and eventual blossoming of a healthier, truer, kinder, more natural person and society.

Hoping our generation and the coming ones are strong, brave and wise enough to raise to the occasion, I think of Julius Caesar’s words in Shakespeare’s play;

“There’s a tide in the affairs of men

Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

IS bound in shallows and miseries”

            William Shakepeare – Act 4, Scene 3

Google vs Facebook social war

Two weeks ago Google started rolling out invites for its awaited social product Google+. The impact it has had is quite big taking into consideration that the number of people to use the system is restricted. It has been so big that some analysts state it has added some US$20bn to Google’s market cap in just one week.

But, why is Google+ so important?

The web has evolved from what was originally a relatively static system of web-pages as a gateway to information, in a way in which it replicated the traditional unidirectional broadcasting of information from traditional media, through the development of tools empowering individuals to produce content of all sorts; music, writing, pictures, movies… sort it out and publish it, to changing the way people communicate and access information nowadays, thus evolving into some sort of neuronal system that can be neither analyzed nor monetized in traditional ways.

The above stated new ability to share and comment, paved the way for the appearance of social networks and collaborational tools, of which Facebook is obviously the leader with its more than 750 million users. In the way a lot of that information sharing now happens within Facebook’s walled garden, Google has increasingly found itself in a position where it no longer has access to large chunks of data and behavior dynamics out there, thus seeing its pseudo monopolistic data gathering systems loss importance, or at least foresee a future in which Google would neither be so important in our everyday lives, or becomes somehow redundant in the way information could be classified and accessed through other services, Facebook in this case.

Bearing the above in Mind, Google has taken steps to really tackle the problem, and, starting from a substitution in its leadership, from Schmidt to Page, from a manager to a warring CEO, from grown up to bold agitation, it has changed the pace for the company and refocused a large part of its activity to come up with a solution to check Facebook’s advance. After a year of coding and preparation, Google+ has been launched.

Many people argue that the new service will not dethrone Facebook due to very many reasons which can be summarized in; a) FB’s outstanding number of current users, b) FB’s first mover advantage and its early adoption as a mainstream standard. Anyhow, the basic difference (and this is an obvious hyper-simplification of such a complex issue) is the ability to adapt user privacy an information sharing with different circles depending on the nature of relationships, thus up-scaling the privacy options In a way in which FB can’t offer as of today.

There are those who argue that the vast majority of FB users never tinker with their privacy settings (70%) and that those who effectively do so are only a small portion (30%) of FB’s users, hence, Google + would only be really appealing to those relatively tech savvy users that actually do yearn for an upgrade in privacy.

Well, for me this is the wrong way to analyze the situation.

The fact is that, if Google+ has the capacity to attract a large number of that 30% (some 250 million users… not bad!) it will have shown two things; a) that Facebook can be attacked to a certain degree of success, and b) that Facebook’s growth trend can be changed as the unique valid social standard.

Let’s not forget that Google + has just launched, and that it will be enriched by the feedback and user behavioral data to be harvested from its users, therefore will probably be fine tuned in the upcoming months and years and become an even more efficient tool.

So, the important thing is to see whether if Google + can change generally accepted perception of Facebook being unassailabe or not, and then wait and see what impact this has on Google’s market cap and Facebook’s run to the IPO. FB is obviously going to gear up and defend its hill, and the next 24 months promise to be fascinating in the way the Microsoft-Apple, or Android – iOS wars have proved to be.

US President at the White House situation room during Bin Laden's killing operation

Three days ago, the first of May 2011, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, addressed the american nation in a historic speech to share with them Osama Bin Laden‘s death.

The terrorist’s hideout had been detected in a Pakistani town, and the stronghold was raided by Navy Seals in a covert operation with the aim of seizing Osama Bin Laden dead or alive. “Enemy killed in action” came out of the speakers at the Situation Room, where the President, Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and other high ranked officials had gathered to check the operation. A decade long man hunt had come to an end.

It is stated in the Coran, the Muslim sacred book that a congregational prayer shall take place every Friday right after noon, the Jumu’ah. Its half of the dhuhr prayer and is usually preceded by a khutbah, a sermon delivered by the Imam. The Jumu’ah typically has a much larger attendance than “normal” prayers.

It’ll be next friday when we’ll see what the reaction to the killing of Osama Bin Laden is through the speeches of the Imams all over the muslim world, which will most probably set the tone and pace of the reaction to the result of the covert operation. Protests and maybe even attacks against american and occidental interests throughout the world must not be discarded. US troops worldwide are at maximum threat level.

We’re going to witness whether if there’s resignation, relief, rage or thirst for revenge, and in the same way that we’ve kept a close real-time look at events unfolding throughout the Middle East and North Africa via social media channels; Twitter, Facebook pages, etc… we’ll most probably be able to follow those chain reactions to spring from friday’s prayer through those same channels that have brought liberty to Egypt, Tunisia, Libia, and are causing civil unrest in Bahrein, Syria, Yemen and most countries in the area.

For the first time we’re going to watch in real-time the consequences of the american strike. Some think those channels have brought freedom. From my point of view its a mistake to think so, they’ve brought information, reliable many times, irrelevant banter for the largest share of it.

The world has become much smaller than it was a couple of years and even months ago. Bin Laden’s was code-named Geronimo, the brave indian warrior. We’ll see what color the clouds of smoke rising from the mosques his death will send throughout the world next friday and what message they carry. The social revolution has come of age as we speak. Long live the freedom of speech and information, for good and for bad.

Wikileaks BinLaden European Nuclear Threat

Yesterday, 1st of May 2011, Barack Obama the President of the United States announced the death or Al Qaeda‘s leader, Osama Bin Laden in a covert operation by US NAvy Seals in Pakistan. Bin Laden was killed during the course of the gun fight with a shot in his head.

Mr Obama announced this to the nation and the world in a televised speech you can find here!

A confidential document with declarations from interrogations that took place at the US Guantanamo prison by Khalish Sheik Mohammed, published by Wikileaks, gain weight in light of the current circumstances. Khalish Shei Mohammed was arrested in 2006 charged with being one of the “brains” behind the terrorist attack against the Twin Towers in September 11.

The terrorist organisation would purportedly have a nuclear weapon in European soil. Said documents state Al Qaeda would explode such weapon and unleash a “nuclear inferno” in Europe were Osama Bin Laden to be arrested or killed.

Those same documents also talk about two additional threats. The first would be a failed plan to seize control of a commercial airplane to be crashed against UK London’s Heathrow airport in 2002. The second one of which details have not been revealed, would aim at striking against a Skyscraper in an unknown location in California.

These statements must be cautiously considered due to several reasons. First of all, they spring from a 2006 declaration, lots of things have happened in the meantime. Additionally, those statements are the result of interrogations that took place in Guantanamo, probably under physical and emotional distress such as the whole world has seen through photos and other types of information. Last but not least, intelligence services from the US and the rest of the civilized world would have had enough time to check the veracity of such statements or any other information leading to the same conclusion, an impending nuclear threat in Europe.

It has been known for a while now that Al Qaeda was in possession of at least one nuclear weapon which it would have acquired during the chaos brought by the decay of the Soviet Communist system. Intelligence services have always thought that weapon would most likely be “deployed” in american soil, in NY probably, after having entered the country by boat via the NY harbor.

In light of the above, it would be foolish not to take into account the threats. US forces are at maximum threat level worldwide after Osama’s death yesterday.

Let’s see what happens. Let’s all pray for Bin Laden’s arrest bringing peace to the world for all races and creeds instead of additional pain and suffering.

Full footage of the historic 1st of May speech by Barack Obama, President of the United States, from the White House, announcing the death of Al Qaeda‘s leader Osama Bin Laden after 10 years of struggle in a raid lead by Navy Seals in Pakistan.

I don’t think any additional words to those of Mr Obama are needed.

Facebook Studio Logo

During the month of April Facebook has introduced its “Facebook Studio” project as part of its drive to capture as much attention from advertising agencies as possible and effectively move forward in its effort to grab market share from Google and Adsense.

Facebook Studio is a community for agencies and marketers active in Facebook . It features marketing, advertising campaigns and adds within Facebook. These can be shared, reviewed, voted, ranked, filtered according to language, geography, etc. It’s a great tool to compile and research advertising initiatives in Facebook, and will prove helpful and beneficial for those looking for inspiration, analysis on what works and what doesn’t. Campaigns and adds are ranked according to how many “likes” they harvest, thus helping the spreading of the individual campaigns as well as serving as a sounding board for what’s effective. There will soon be a “Facebook Studio Award” to recognize the work of most “liked” campaigns within different categories. In general it’s a great addition for those working within the platform.

It’s a smart move, it obviously looks to galvanize agencies and their activity, and promises to become a useful tool for those willing to invest in Facebook advertising. It helps in its “battle” with Google for online advertising expenditure.

As far as I see it Facebook is deploying features and “projects” that help the use and comprehension of advertising related activity in its effort to provide a better product than the search juggernaut. It provides content which is more useful and attractive than Google/Adsense related one in the way in which it “harnesses” the power of the people (the advertising community in this case) as well as leverages on its higher-than-Google design excellence.

The bottom line is, both of them hold on to their philosophies, Google to its fully automated engineer-driven culture, look and feel, etc, and Facebook providing tools to foster user-generated content/momentum. The battle between these two approaches is fascinating and promises to be long a long war to redefine many aspects of our digital live in the near future.

Disruption

We are obviously leaving in times of change, revolution and evolution. Many sectors are undergoing brusque changes in their structures, players and in general all aspects of their businesses and relationships.

The final step onto the Knowledge society has brought disruption to many sectors and companies such as; music, publishing, retail distribution, travel, etc… However, this has only been the tip of the iceberg which the “old ways” of going about businesses is going to ram against, and it will be like hitting a brick wall.

Let’s define disruption first, it’s the interruption of a convention or widely accepted belief through the implementation of a new idea that helps the fulfillment of a vision. From a business perspective, disruption can take the form of better quality, better pricing and so on and so forth, always with the re-shaping of a particular market or market segment.

From my point of view, there are three very clear candidates for massive disruption, these are; Energy, Education and Healthcare. I won’t go extensively into them here, but I’m convinced we’ll, sooner rather than later, witness deep transformations in each one of them.

Education

As Sir Kenneth Robinson has well put it, we have a fast-food model of education, where a standard set of parameters is followed in order to achieve “academic excellence” and pave the way for a future successful career. This is very good if we want to have a society and world run by people who are not creative or imaginative, who aren’t willing to move outside of the pre-established median, thus mediocrity.

In the way in which the current democratization of knowledge and access to it are readily available to large masses of people, that users can interact remotely and that this can be done without leaving one’s own house, we’ll most probably see a great shift from Bricks and Mortar plain vanilla education systems/programs in favor of more social ways of learning and growing.  This will have an obvious impact in higher education institutional funding, a recalibration of academic degrees, and in general all the effects to be felt due to a shift in the tectonic plaques of educational systems in the civilized world.

Energy

There’s a need for cleaner cheaper energy. If this wasn’t clear to all a couple of months ago, after the Fukushima incident and the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, if someone hasn’t come around that bend already they shouldn’t be reading this, they’re too stuck in the ways of the old world.

There’s going to be, already is, a push for the discovery of abundant sources of clean and cheap energy. I don’t know if its going to be a replica of photosynthesis, a new way of harnessing the power of light, some new system to safely exploit atomic energy or a discovery in nuclear fission, what I do know is that while these new discoveries happen and effectively become industrially operational, there’s going to be a major disruption in the way in which energy is distributed.

Nowadays, we have an industrialized system for energy distribution springing from old ways of energy generation. From my point of view the disruption will come when energy starts being treated as a network, this is, when the deployment, use and distribution of energy will depend upon intelligent systems that take into account networks and not linear systems, moving thus closer to the interweaving of people and their lifestyles.

Healthcare

The medical world has always faced three major questions to solve; 1) Diagnosis, 2) Medication, 3) treatment. If one takes a close look at that hierarchical system, there’s a primigenious element that needs to concur for the healing and healthcare process to take place and be effective, this is, information.

Information is needed in order to diagnose. This information is current and past. The result of the “bundling” of that information and the doctor’s opinion will lead to the prescription of drugs of which information is also needed and in the last instance, new sets of data will be created as an offspring of treatment.

So, there’s going to be a massive disruption in the adaptation of data/information rich processes to the healthcare industry. This will come in the way of unified medical records, data harvesting, data processing and mining, and eventually data access across the board. Records won’t be institution centric anymore, but move closer to people centric systems whereby a patient’s record is readily available anytime anywhere and doctor’s who treated specific illnesses in the past will be accessible by colleagues in order to have their opinion.

Anyhow, disruption in the three above mentioned areas, which are just around the corner, will make a cleaner, cheaper and safer world, will plant the seed to have freethinkers and creative minds strive forward in the making of a better world through the coming closer to fulfilling human potential, thus creating happier people, and last but not least, reduce healthcare bills, improve treatments and their results, and advance towards exploiting the benefits of massive pools of health related data in a way to improve human condition and the world we live in.

I can’t wait for all these things to happen, and I’m truly and honestly thrilled and puzzled to see what kind of projects, companies and products actually breakthrough and help make this world of ours a better, cleaner, healthier and safer place.

Google Plus-one

Google is finally starting to show its cards in the “social wars”. Further than its failures with Buzz and Wave, the search engine juggernaut is introducing, for the first time, a social parameter into its algorithmic computations to show search results.

This bid to make search more social is the first of developments of a series of “launches” that will take place across all of Google’s properties. As of yesterday’s afternoon, Google will allow its search users to vote results “+1” and share this preference with their connections across the board, this is GTalk, Gmail, Google Reader, Buzz, etc, as well as outside of its scope of products via Twitter. In addition to the information Google already offered for each search result, it will now show the names and photos of contacts who have stated a preference.

Google Plus-One search result social sharing system

The importance of this is dual.

It’s the first time Google allows some sort of not-computerized input into its logarithmic page rank computations. It might seem trivial for outside spectators, but for those acquainted with Google’s “fully automated” philosophy, it shows that the search company is willing to go deep into revising its model to adapt to new trends, embrace the social phenomenon, and actually broadcast a clear message to Facebook.

This is Google’s first real foray into Facebook’s social walled garden, in the way in which it’s not just trying to come up with a Facebook competing product or isotope, such as Orkut is for example. It is willing to play around and tinker with the magic hen that lays its golden eggs, responsible for approximately 95% of its revenues, search.  Now, this is an indication that Google is getting serious about social, and most probably will keep on exploring, poking and probing with a large number of features, further than products, which, if properly combined with its ubiquitous search operation, could prove painful if not lethal for Facebook.

Obviously there are other areas of social that Google will have to explore, mainly users’ social graphs, data gathering from user social interactions, and probably the most important one, casual games.

Call it poker, Cityville, Farmville or whatever, I’m sure Google is looking and putting a lot of thought and energy into how to access that space. Hundreds of millions of users gather around social games everyday from everywhere in the world to buy pink tractors, sweep their friends’ minds with winning poker hands, draughts, starships, bridge, chess…. And that is something Google is just not going to let fall into Facebook’s hands without putting up a fight for. They maybe late, but certainly are not dead. And even if they were, some dead walk.

Let’s wait and see. Further than the previous skirmishes, a Rubicon has been crossed, the Social Wars have begun. Alea Jacta Est!