And here I thought Google's new social network was called Google Buzz -- but reports this week say it's actually named Google Me. This is an offering that Google is apparently very serious about because Google Buzz, which launched earlier this year, didn't stop Google's social networking itch. No surprise there, as Google Buzz doesn't seem to have much, well, buzz. After an initial burst of publicity -- much of it to do with the early misstep of having user accounts auto-follow one another -- it's not exactly the talk of the town, which means it's not the social net …

Whenever mobile social media comes up in conversation, I tend to hear a lot of f-words. Hopefully they won't be censored here, as the ones I'm referring to are Foursquare and Facebook. The f-words play important roles, but mobile social media is much bigger. To give a sense of how much bigger it is, I'll be discussing various forms of mobile social media that may be relevant when developing a marketing program.

The next step, and one that the more traditional types in the industry haven't entirely made, is to get better at creating really compelling experiences within the digital services in which they now play. But just as it is with kids and play -- as any parent knows, play is a child's work -- this, too, will develop into a stronger understanding about how to make digital, social services work as marketing applications.

"Ubiquity" was one word that struck me when David Kirkpatrick, author of "The Facebook Effect," kept mentioning it at a Gotham Media Ventures breakfast panel last week. The other was "China." Those were the answers. The questions, if you summon Johnny Carson's Carnac, were, respectively, "What is Facebook's goal?" and "What is Facebook's biggest obstacle in achieving its goal?"

Some ideas are so obvious that, when they suddenly emerge, you wonder why it took so long for them to develop in the first place. So it is with YouTube's CitizenTube news feed, which launched this week along with the help of students at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. This subsite of YouTube aggregates -- or should I say curates -- citizen news posted to YouTube on one site. (CitizenTube has been around as a channel and concept for awhile, but the news feed treatment takes the idea up a few notches.)

f, decades from now, I lie on my deathbed having flashbacks of some of the more humiliating moments of my life, then last week's encounter at a 7-Eleven will be one of them. It was at such an establishment on East 23rd Street in Manhattan where a young, amiable staff member saw me working the Slurpee machine and asked, "Do you need help with that?"

I was just reading my fellow Social Media Insider's column "20 Confessions of a Super Mayor," and realized that I have a confession or two to make of my own. When it comes to Foursquare, Gowalla and so forth, I am... nowhere.

Over Memorial Day weekend, I reached one of those coming-of-age milestones that only a Social Media Insider reader could appreciate: I became a Super Mayor. In light of the achievement, it's a good occasion to reflect on what the badge means beyond the sum of its pixels. Here's one Foursquare user's tell-all.

Some people compete around badges and mayorships (Foursquare), connections and testimonials (LinkedIn), followers and list appearances (Twitter), and gang members and farm acreage (Zynga). Lately, I've found a new addiction: racking up profiles added and managed (Geni). Geni, one of the leading genealogy sites, tells me I've added 334 relatives to my family tree. Most of the connections happened in the past few weeks, and it's all thanks to social media.

I'm not sure the topic I'm writing about actually has a name, but let's give it a shot: counterfeit social media. If you look around, we're moving ever more deeply into an era in which a lot of social media is moving from its natural state (woman-is-mad-at-retailer- and-blogs-about-it), to a less natural one in which companies actively push consumers to stick their brand into the tweetstream (talk-about-us-and-earn-points!). And while the former certainly hasn't -- and won't -- go away, I'm wondering how the growth of what I am not-very-kindly calling "counterfeit" social muddies the waters, and makes the voice of …