When I spoke at Facebook about In The Plex recently, rumors were swirling that the social networking giant was about to enter China, supposedly in a partnership with the search engine Baidu. So I made sure that my talk to a dining hall full of FB’ers included the cautionary tale of what happened when Google met China. (An excerpt of the saga as detailed in my book appeared in Fortune.)

Though similar in some ways—focus on engineering, full-on embrace of Internet values–Facebook and Google are quite different companies. Their China efforts will also undoubtedly vary. But some of the challenges that Facebook will encounter will be just as tricky as the ones Google faced. Those problems ultimately led to Google’s reconsideration of the enterprise.

So I suggest to Facebook that its leaders think hard before taking the leap

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Here’s some areas where Facebook must find good answers to tough questions before it makes that China leap.

Censorship. In order to do business in China, Google had to make a horrendous compromise: agreeing to filter its search results according to the demands of an oppressive government striving to deny vital information to its citizens. Facebook will have to make a different kind of compromise: somehow preventing free discourse when it comes to speech that threatens the authoritarians in charge of China. This may not affect the core of Facebook’s activities, most of which are prosaic. But how will the lines be drawn? Will there be an agreement in principle of verboten content, or will Facebook have to remove offending posts and pages every time China demands it? What happens when an international friend of a Chinese Facebook user posts something—or sends a message—with content that the Government doesn’t like? Will Chinese censors monitor Facebook friend feeds?

Privacy. One of the most shameful corporate episodes in Internet history was Yahoo’s decision to turn over to the Chinese government the identity of a dissident who assumed anonymity. The user got a ten-year jail sentence, and Yahoo is still scorned. What will happen to Facebook’s users when they come under scrutiny from the government? Will Baidu/Facebook turn over private information with a single phone call from an official? What about the connections between Chinese citizens and Facebook users on other countries. If I, as a US citizen using Facebook in the United States, is a “friend” of a Chinese user and that user has access to my private information, what assurances will I have that the Chinese government doesn’t have that access too? Conversely, will Chinese Facebook users be walled off from the rest of the world?

Baidiu as partner. When I spoke to Baidu CEO Robin Li about censorship, he told me that his problem was not political, but that it was a technical annoyance that slowed things down. In other words, Baidu wants to stay clear of issues of free speech, period. Is Facebook comfortable with such a stance? Also, a partnership with Baidu may affect Facebook’s efforts to ally with content-holders like Hollywood studios. Though it has recently attempted to become a better copyright citizen, Baidu has a reputation as a powerful enabler of copyright infringement.

Global image. Facebook’s prominence in recent Middle East democratic uprisings has put it in an awkward situation. Facebook executives never planned for the service to become a rallying point for dissidents, and they take pains to note that the phenomenon is simply a function of its users making use of a powerful tool. Yet all of this also is a source of pride for Facebook, and the company seems happy to accept the bounties of the subsequent halo effect. But what would happen if Chinese activists made efforts to create a Jasmine Revolution page—and Baidu/Facebook was asked to take it down? (Or institute censorship rules to make sure it never appears in the first place.) Ask Google about tarnished halos.

Whether it goes to China or not, Facebook is staring down the gun barrel of regulation. Its M.O. when it comes to privacy issues– recklessness followed by apologies and amends—has already worn thin. Being seen as a tool of the dictatorship in China would hobble Facebook’s efforts to convince legislators and regulators that its overall mission is positive, and its efforts to balance sharing and privacy should be seen in a favorable light. There’s also a possibility that the Chinese experience may tarnish the brand with its users, though after its painless survival of the Zuckerberg portrayal in The Social Network, one has to conclude that Facebook is covered by some pretty mighty Teflon.

Nonetheless, before Facebook leaps into China, I’d advise its executives to step carefully. The last time a company heady with hubris tried this, it stumbled into a world of pain.

Mike Swift, who does a great job covering Google for the San Jose Mercury News, sits down with departing Sr. VP Jonathan Rosenberg for an interview. (I’m pleased that IN THE PLEX found its way into the conversation, about a story involving something Larry’s mom said to Rosenberg.)

Swift got Rosenberg to discuss the book he’s writing with Eric Schmidt.

The truth is it’s really my notes of all the management meetings I’ve been in with Eric, Larry and Sergey (Brin, co-founder of Google). So the proper title for that book really is, sort of, Jonathan Rosenberg playing Alexis de Tocqueville in Google internal management meetings. Somewhere, each of those rules is either my rule, Eric’s rule, Larry’s rule, Sergey’s rule or some other leader on the Google management team. Eric and I have been doing some internal seminars where we have been teaching this set of rules to Google employees, mostly managers. We are harvesting narratives and stories from them, so that we can build more narratives and stories into the book. What we would like to do is produce our version of the rules of management that we developed out of working at Google.

And here I thought I did the de Tocqueville thing at Google! Plenty of room for more! I’m especially eager to hear the kind of stuff that goes on at the meetings they wouldn’t let me get near.

Wall Street has had a little freakout out over Google’s results. Not its revenues—Google had a 27 percent increase, quite impressive for a company its size. The problem, in lucre-geek-speak, was opex: operating expenses. In addition to taking in and making a lot of money (well over $2 billion), Google spent a lot of money.

A lot of the spending was due to Google’s aggressive—some say desperate—employee compensation and hiring strategy. Keeping Googlers on board is expensive when so many are tempted to go to places like Facebook and Twitter, or start their own companies. Google bumped up everyone’s salaries, from chefs to Android-ers, ten percent. Google also is smack in the middle of a hiring binge, having brought in about a third of the 6000 Nooglers it plans to hire this year. And certain employees who apparently got offers from competitors reaped huge stock deals that figured in yesterday’s high operating expenses.

In Wall Street World, not hitting every single numerical mark is a sign to panic. So Google stock took a hit—over eight percent. Woah.

But Google had warned investors from the beginning that it would not play the quarterly expectations game, regarding as noise the fluctuations from Wall Street reactions to earnings. To Google, it’s all about the long term, and in this case the company clearly figured that Google would be better positioned if it kept its talent, even if it had to pay a king’s ransom. Long term benefits are also the justification for another big expense: fortifying Google’s already-impressive infrastructure.

The person who first outlined that warning about blowing off short-term results, by the way, was Larry Page, the main author of the essay that led off Google’s prospectus when the company went public. Back then he was eloquent in explaining why Google would look towards the horizon, even if was subject to consequences like the Wall Street spanking that following its earnings announcement yesterday. So it was disappointing that Page’s appearance on the earnings call yesterday was merely a cameo appearance—more like Alfred Hitchcock quickly spotted in a scene of his movie than a meaty, Michael Shannon-esque supporting role. After giving a few upbeat, unenlightening comments, he ducked out. So it was up to Patrick Pichette, Google’s CFO, to answer the analyst who asked the following question: What does Larry think?

Too bad, the CEO couldn’t answer for himself. I suspect that Larry would have made a passionate, compelling case for Google’s course of action. It’s not like he isn’t thinking about it.

In 1999, when Google had its first press conference—to announce its $25 million VC financing and generally introduce itself to the world as a company– Larry and Sergey prepared some slides. One slide focused on the Google team. But it did not provide the full names of Google’s early brainiacs. They were identified by first name only.

One might assume that in 2011, now that Google is a big public corporation, that there would be more transparency. But last week—or sometime in the recent past—Google had one of the biggest management shifts in its history and the news came via a leak to the Los Angeles Times. That was Thursday, and while Google officially confirmed that something like that shift took place, we have yet to get a statement or a blog item that actually explains what happened, why, and what it may mean.

The re-org does confirm what we already know about Larry. He’s already making big changes in his super-energized stint as CEO, and he doesn’t care much about keeping the press (and by extension, Google’s shareholders) informed about what he’s up to.

Now for the shift. Basically, Larry has organized Google by product category, with a senior vice president in charge of each group The actual personnel aren’t surprising—if you read IN THE PLEX you would know that Susan Wojcicki, Salar Kamanager, Alan Eustace, Jeff Huber and Sundar Pichai are powerful and dynamic heads of their divisions. You’d also know that Vic Gundotra has risen to a strong position within the company and has been heading Google’s crucial efforts in the social space. (With Bradley Horowitz as a strong partner in those efforts.)

But there are a couple of surprises. Eustace (who was already a Senior VP) has moved from head of engineering to search, and I’m not sure whether this means anything to Udi Manber, who formerly held the role of search czar, but is not a senior VP. And Huber’s domain now apparently extends to the local-geo area. When Marissa Mayer moved out of her search products world and into geo, Google made a big deal of that. It would be nice to see this clarified.

For those who need more evidence that pursuing a social strategy is high on the stack, here it is—recognition of social products as a full division, even though it’s a work in progress. Furthering this is another alleged innovation by Larry, of tying a quarter of next years bonus for every Google employee to its success in social. (I say alleged because, once again, this news was leaked out to the press, and on this one Google wouldn’t confirm or deny. But the non-denial seems to be a stealth confirmation.)

Surely, there’s a lot that begs explaining in this, and I really hope that someone—ideally, Larry Page—explains the philosophy behind the shuffling and where the non-product areas fit into the organization. How about a blog item from the CEO? It’s to everyone’s benefit to know where people stand at Google. The Kremlinology of determining the company’s priorities and structures from leaked press items is a destructive process.

Another point. There’s been a lot written about Google’s brain drain, and employee retention is indeed a big issue. But the composition of this list says a lot about Google’s stability. Of the six executives involved in this product cabal, two of them were among Google’s first tiny group of employees (Wojcicki, Kamanger), and almost all the others arrived pre-IPO. (That was in 2004.) The most recent arrival is Gundotra, the rare Google executive who thrived after leaving a high position at Microsoft. And he’s been at Google for five years. Another executive who was around early enough to be identified only by first name in that 1999 slide is, Urs Höltzle, whose memo a year ago urging a focus on social was the spur of its current push (It was dubbed the Urs-quake.) He’s still the top guy in infrastructure.

Larry has made all his key executives commit to several years of intense work, so presumably all of the people in the announcement. You have to figure that his earliest employees are now so fantastically wealthy that if they didn’t believe in what he was doing they would not reenlist: they’d go off to start other companies, devote themselves to philanthropy, or just veg out in luxury. Instead, they’re reenergized members of Team Larry.