Three unrelated items got me thinking about consumer social media and the issue of scale. TheFind will send emails to users of its Glimpse app alerting them to sales on products they’ve Liked via Facebook. Skype’s GroupMe is testing another social commerce angle - local “events” like group dinners for small groups of friends. And Google turned on its recommendations feature for its +1 button infrastructure. Users that mouse over the +1 button on a site will see other articles or pages from the same site – though not necessarily on related topics – that their friends have +1’d. All of these face critical-mass challenges. While TheFind leverages Like button scale, it doesn’t have direct relationships with many merchants, so it’s not necessarily going to know about sales (it scrapes data). That goes double for GroupMe; it’s trying to do local deals without local presence. The Google+ option is appealing for sites and publishers – especially if they think it will help their search rankings, too – but Google has a long way to go to reach Facebook- or Twitter-size user bases.