Facebook yesterday announced it is adding Skype video chat to its growing list of features.

This is not a trivial matter.

With its Skype video chat announcement, Facebook merges social with communication. If done right, that’s a tremendously powerful combination.

For one, think of Facebook as your white pages on steroids; a single globally connected super-large phonebook stuffed with detailed profiles, likes and dislikes, photos, links, messaging – the works!

Now add video chat to the mix. Is this the genesis of Facebook Telecom?

Not quite. But at closer look, the social network giant might just have the wherewithal to grow into the first global social IP carrier.

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Televisions and set-top boxes with embedded network interfaces are coming, that much is agreed upon.  What’s up for discussion, though, is just what the user interface is going to look like – an “internet video-only” implementation that places a premium on simplicity and system stability, or a full-featured “browser for the couch” allowing full unrestricted access to the internet.

Gordon Campbell, a 30+ year veteran of the semiconductor design and marketing industry with stints at Honeywell, Motorola, Intel, and several start-ups under his belt, calls the former approach “hogwash.”   According to a recent article, his current company Personal Web Systems (no web site yet)) plans to bring a device to market later this year allowing full unrestricted access to the web (the company also has plans to subsequently offer that same functionality to CE manufacturers on a single chip).

“This generation doesn’t want their hands tied behind their backs. They want the same experience as with a PC (on their TV)“, Campbell states.

I think he is precisely wrong.

Television web browsing has been tried many times before, with little or no success – and although today’s increased broadband penetration and (more text-friendly) HD screen resolutions suggest perhaps it’s time again to make yet another pass at it, the bottom line is that average folks just do not want a lean-forward PC experience on their TV, thank you very much.  And even if they did, there would be user input device issues to solve (keyboard on your coffee table, anyone?), challenging security issues to deal with,  and (in contrast with computer users), zero tolerance for crashes and restarts.

I could go on and on – but in short, I feel it’s a mistake to assume that internet access necessarily dictates a full PC/web browser paradigm – for example, consider twitter, skype, IM, even iTunes – all examples of succesful non-browser/non-PC dependent internet applications, none of which “this generation” would consider “hogwash”.

Once you explain to them what the word “hogwash” means, that is.  

To sum up, the consumer electronics industry has discovered the internet – and these new devices are not going to need (or look anything like) a PC or a web browser.

For better or worse, the TCP/IP protocol (and the internet it makes possible) will not remain the exclusive turf of the computer industry for very much longer – a point some in the industry are slow to see.

Interesting! A number of German towns actually started objecting to Google’s Street View cars mapping the country’s streets and roads.

The idea that there is “someone, all the way from America” to photograph local streets, homes, and people for the rest of us to retrieve online (understandably) raises some concerns.

To put things into perspective, imagine someone from Germany – or any other overseas country for that matter – deciding to send black-colored vans with roof-mounted cameras down main street USA.

Remember, there’s still a considerable number of people that have never heard of Google, let alone used it.

To be sure, on both sides of the Atlantic, plenty seem increasingly concerned personal data protection is being ignored as more information is digitally disseminated and stored outside our reach.

From state-side online trolling and Google’s recent Chrome browser launch, to Germany’s scandal over T-Mobile subscriber data theft, these are only a few examples of what might go wrong if digital data gets misappropriated.

Add to that the latest uproar over Skype’s leak of Chinese dissidents information, and it becomes clear why public trust in personal digital data privacy is waning fast.

Of course, the trojan horse of personal digital data capture has been out the barn for years.

Google and other software vendors have long been aggregating civic data sets, to fuel both innovation and commercial interests wrapped in a single free and “viral” application.

Plenty of us have come to appreciate that and gladly use resulting applications to make our lives easier.

Clearly, if we want our location-based services to actually work and function as we would expect them to (ever sat in a car and the GPS system lead you the wrong way?), we will need to let someone collect prerequisite hyper-local information to improve personalized application capabilities to the benefit of you and I.

Even if things don’t quite go as planned?

In a recent conversation with a European friend of mine, he mentioned his ability to discern from Google Earth images that it was his very own neighbor that had rudely parked in his spot the day his area was “data captured”.

He then went on to tell me about a female resident nude-bathing on the rooftop of an Amsterdam apartment building, only to be camera-captured, you guessed it, by Google Earth.

Clearly, on the user-side of the discussion not everything is perfect in geo-tagging land, but most of us have long and willingly participated enjoying the mostly productive advantages from actual usage of such application and the underlying data harnessed.

In fact I wonder if we could ever again live without?

But brand and user perception differs among cultures. Any company seeking to expand and succeed beyond its own boarders needs to be able to address local idiosyncrasies first.

In other words, what is felt productive and OK in parts of the US can easily be misconstrued outside.

Unless you adopt to the local “lingua franca” of regional acceptability, people will have a harder time understanding you and the products you seek to offer over time.