Facebook, Google Truce in the Works at F8 - The Need to Sing Kum Ba Ya (
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Look, these two can slug each other in the face
bloody over social ads. But before they get there, they need to open up the Web
together and facilitate this "decentralization" Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg so correctly preached multiple times today.
Glazer and the Facebook folks seem to be in
agreement about socializing the Web, but that doesn't mean there is a clear-cut
right or wrong way to it. I asked Glazer to distinguish the Friend Connect and
Facebook Connect approaches for me once again. He told me:
The most obvious difference is Friend Connect lets you work
with any other social information. Facebook Connect lets you work with
Facebook. So whereas when you log into Friend Connect, you log in with any Open
ID, from anyone on the Web, and you can use social information from anywhere in
the Web. With Facebook Connect, you log in with a Facebook identity, you can
use your Facebook profile and your Facebook friends. There are pros and cons to
that, but that is a pretty significant difference. I think the other difference
is, technically, how much of the core technology is based on open standards
versus proprietary standards. That's another choice. There are trade-offs to both.
If you are like me at all (only half a
conspiracy theorist), you will read that statement as a rather frank assertion
that Google is more open with Friend Connect than Facebook is with Connect.
Glazer won't say that is bad, but he won't say that is good. I asked him if
this would be a problem for Facebook down the road. He said:
No. "Problem" is too strong a word. The dialogue
will be, What's the right mix of proprietary approaches and open standard
approaches, between proprietary data and open data? All have the same strengths
to respect the users' privacy and respect the users' wishes and let users do
what they want and expect with their information. We're all sharing those
goals.
I say it's bad for Facebook. At some point, the walled garden has to be
razed. You can talk about decentralizing Facebook all you want, but until you
level the playing field with open standards the way Friend Connect purports to
do, you're going to be kind of closed. But that's just me.
The reason Facebook can make this work now is that it's got 90 million users.
That may be more than enough to propel Facebook Connect by itself, so Facebook
may not care if it turns off a few open-source zealots.
Again, that's just me mulling, not Glazer.
Application Development 
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