What I’m actually excited to hear more about are Google’s plans to turn Google+ into an enterprise social platform, competing with Yammer, SocialText and the rest, especially if you use Google Apps.

I’m doing a Google Apps pilot project and deployment right now, and the one thing that’s missing is a Yammer-like social layer. I could buy Yammer, but that’s a few thousand bucks a year (for this client), so it’s not really feasible. But a free add-on to Google Apps? Yes, please! Even if it’s a poor imitation of Yammer.

If the Google+ internal enterprise social layer could also be extended out to the public side of Google+, I can imagine Google winning over more of the professional social media landscape.  Can’t wait to see what happens.

Just getting in to Pinterest and exploring, so I don’t have any feedback re: brands. The shopping thing does seem like a “no brainer”. Hard to imagine there won’t be a deluge. Probably would be even more big brand adoption if there had been a few more months for them to develop prior to Christmas.

The value proposition for larger pages has very rarely been about meaningful interaction (it’s much more transactional, deal based, etc.) and there is also often a huge joiner effect in play where people just sign up or “like” something because a lot of other people have done so before them. 

But for brands that want to really have conversations with their customers, I think smaller, more narrowly focused communities may be the way to go.

I think pursuing that strategy echoes (some of our) desire post-globalization to return to the days of smaller, closer-knit communities and brands can definitely take advantage of that impulse if they’re smart about it.