One has to wonder, when you read news like this, where Orange France is stating that their 500MB per month data plan, tied to the iPhone, excludes pretty much everything other than email and web browsing. So no VoIP, modem access for your laptop, or even newsgroups (??).

In Spain, Vodafone has been toting 5GB/month plans for some time now, with similar “fair use” policies. What is exactly the point of having such huge data plans, when all you can do is squint at the web on a tiny screen, or read your email – without trying to open attachments which are even harder to read. Granted, the iPhone has represented a leap in usability on these two fields, with fantastic web browsing, and very usable email where attachments can at least be useful. The only problem is the iPhone is one device lacking many functionality other platforms already enjoy, such as VoIP, decent IM, and…newsgroup access. These will come for sure, only because there is a very dedicated community of hackers porting and writing applications for it.

During my first month of iPhone use, when the novelty wants to make you try everything and, for example, browse the web when you don’t really need to, but just because it’s so cool – I went through about 70MB of data. Peanuts, compared to the 1GB plan I had with Vodafone…

When I started reading some interesting articles about Facebook’s new ad system, which is supposed to combine what your friends are doing, buying and recommending, with the available ad content, my first thought aside from the spying-on-users issue was “How are they going to get the little guys on board this thing?”.

Let me explain: CocaCola doesn’t really -need- to advertise on Facebook, as it’s one (if not the most) recognized brands on the planet. Still, it has created this animated Sprite Sips Facebook application, which you can “boost” with codes found under Sprite bottle caps. The app will most likey be installed by a large number of people, basically, because it comes from a well-recognized brand which is also regarded as cool, many of which already drink the stuff on a regular basis.

What is happening is that users are marketing to other users with well-known products – but would they do the same with, say, ‘BoogieCola’? This imaginary company may be desperate to market its product as much as it can, having just launched into an already crowded space, with a product that may not be so nice and with a brand image which could be the result of the CEO’s 5-year-old son’s doodling on a paper. In other platforms, they could buy their way into the top advertising spots (read: Google AdWords), and make an impact across a wide population segment. While not a guarantee of success, at least you will not be able to say you failed because nobody knew you existed. On Facebook, this company would have probably gone largely ignored – as the ads targeted to users would probably point to the already-know, already-heavily-recommended brand. Thus, it will be pretty hard for newcomers to make Facebook an effective platform for entry into a market. In the end, the (OMG I’ve said it, I will burn in hell!) long tail of advertisers, who provide a sizable chunk of Google’s revenue, will not be sending their bucks to Facebook.

Could this new system make substantial revenue for Facebook? I guess so – but not in the long term, and most definitely not enough to even consider taking Google out of the picture. Google is omnipresent in many countries and market segments, while Facebook has had an impact basically in the US, a large market by itself, but again, not as big as the one the Big G has access to.

Google is already tracking you on millions of sites, thanks to this little piece of code:

<script src=”http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js” type=”text/javascript”>
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
_uacct=”UA-xxxx-x”;
urchinTracker();
</script>

Do you use GMail? Well, Google is scanning the contents of all your messages, and they also log the IP address you use to check your email – thus, they can tie all your browsing habits to your individual email account and the content of your emails. This is a huge amount of information for any company to gather about individuals. Additionally, Google keeps records of the searches you perform on their engine, thus giving them yet another layer of data to check. Scared yet?

In contrast, Facebook announced that they will be launching a targeted advertising platform with 44 partner sites, which will add a tracking code informing Facebook of your browsing habits. More by Om Malik here. I personally don’t care about 44 sites, but about the millions of sites using Google Analytics, and about the people using GMail to check their corporate email accounts, thus potentially having sensitive material indexed by Google. Food for thought.

View some live coverage by Engadget here, who are in a conference call with Google’s PR. The new mobile OS will be called Android – a damn ugly name if you ask me, but we’ll see if it will live up to expectations, with the iPhone raising the bar much higher than Symbian ever has done.