Google launched Google+ last week, and they’re off to a roaring start. It’s their third swing at the piñata, and they may have found the formula for knocking Facebook off its pedestal.

Google’s first two swings were Wave and Buzz. They both went bust, and it looks like Google has learned from their mistakes. Still in Beta, Google+ has been opened to a fairly large audience of testers (tens of thousands) and looks plenty sweet. It does what Facebook – and every other social media site – should have done from the beginning. It makes social networking useful, relevant and easy to do.

Xaxis is a new service launched by WPP (a large, global advertising firm). Xaxis is modeled after Google’s interest-based advertising. Advertisers choose from over 1,000 interest based categories to be able to target their advertising.

What makes this a big deal is that Xaxis, through WPP, has access to a database of over 500 million profiles; the largest such database in the world.

This puts your privacy – and how to protect it – smack in the middle of the spotlight. Listen to today’s show to know why you should be concerned, and what to do.

And companies of all sizes are bringing social networking in-house. Companies such as SalesForce, Yammer, Cisco Systems and SuccessFactors make it possible for you to have your own, internal social network. Could it be that social media is about to go the way of the CB Radio?

CB Radios were a big deal back in the 1970’s. Smokey and The Bandit (a Burt Reynolds’s film) came out in 1977 and made this handy two-way radio into a pop culture hit. Everyone had a CB in their car, camper and even their living rooms. Today, CB radios are back to being used by truckers, RVers, and park rangers.

With businesses getting serious about using social media wisely, could it be that some of the social media hype will die away? I think so. And I have a pretty good example of what social media is really all about – word of mouth advertising.

Listen to this week’s episode of Social Media: Cheap and Easy. Then tell me what you think at [email protected].