By Greg Brooks

Morpheus, from the Matrix. Yes we know the 'blue pill' you were thinking of, you dirty lot.

So Justin Timberlake is the saviour of MySpace. LinkedIn is beginning to act more like Facebook with developers. And social media is finally beginning to reach the point where an unsocial online experience, no matter where you are on the web, will be increasingly hard to find.

I can feel myself reaching for the blue pill.

Recent press stories about people departing Facebook in droves may have been the reaction of the uber-cool to the news that the social network had passed 700m users, but there is a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I’m not cool, and yet I’m still beginning to feel that social networks aren’t necessarily the great thing that I thought they once were.

I don’t necessarily want every single page of the web to be populated with faces of my friends or business colleagues. I don’t really want to crowdsource every aspect of my life. I don’t really want my friend’s opinion on EVERYTHING I do and every decision I make online to be open to judgement by my peers. But the arms race to integrate ‘the social graph’ into every aspect of my online life is beginning to feel like this will be the reality sooner rather than later.

This week Google has launched a whole host of new and upgraded services. Buried amongst all the hype about Facebook Vs Google+ is the launch of Social Plug-in Tracking.

According to Mashable the tool ‘compares the impact of different types of social actions on your website. It not only tracks +1s, but it also tracks Twitter tweets, Facebook Likes, Facebook Sends and other social actions.’

To the consumer these changes are fairly meaningless, but to the webmaster, content strategist and data analyst, the latest Google foray into analytics provides another layer of complexity and insight that allows them to more carefully target their readers and customers – wherever they are.

For the rest of us in the industry, who sit somewhere in the middle in terms of knowledge, it is another blue pill moment. The saying goes that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and for those within the marketing industry, who know how powerful and important data is becoming and how far company’s knowledge of your online actions will extend very soon, Google’s latest upgrade is yet another step towards a ‘full data picture’ of every user online and what the more alarmist would call ‘Big Brother’.

As for me?  I’m not an alarmist and I’m definitely not cool. But I do possess enough knowledge to confuse and scare myself. I’m off to pop the blue pill now.