Last week at the Google I/O conference MySpace made a significant announcement about integration of their messaging platform with Google Gears to enable searching and sorting of messages. For the longest time, I have been writing that Facebook needs to update their messaging system to make it easier to search and sort through. With the help of Google gears, MySpace has made this type of sorting and searching a reality.

Last week Mike Arrington sugested that MySpace has over 170 million messages sent every day on the service. With some users suffering inbox fatigue, the service has been immediately released for users with at least 5,000 messages in their inbox. Over the coming weeks and months this threshold will be lowered to enable more users to take advantage of the new service.

For those of you that think in code, MySpace has also posted their presentation from last week’s Google I/O conference. This announcement also highlights the strong relationship between Google and MySpace who are both trying to compete with Facebook. While I have yet to use the new message integration, based on the video below, it appears to be a slick application. The only question now is why hasn’t Facebook updated their messaging system?

I wasn’t able to make it but I’ve seen the pictures. An impressive crowd of developers converged upon San Francisco to discuss the future of the social web and how the Google standards can be used to accomplish developer goals. The biggest difference between Google’s event and Facebook developer garages? More developers and an entrance fee. The goal is clear: attract as much attention as possible from developers worldwide.

Attention was given by developers and some big announcements were made. Among the announcements was that AOL will now begin supporting the OpenSocial standard. You can read more about it over on the Google blog post. Google also announced the release of OpenSocial version 0.8, meaning that it is still in beta but moving closer to becoming a finalized standard. One other announcement by Google was that Netlog, the Belgium-based social network, will begin supporting OpenSocial applications, making them available to its 35 million users in Europe.

While it is still unclear what Google’s long-term goal with OpenSocial is, it appears that they have come close to succeeding what the original goal was: out open Facebook. Facebook is expected to formally announce the details of their fbOpen initiative at this week’s Facebook developer garage in Palo Alto. While Google’s aim of out-opening Facebook may have succeeded in a matter of months, the real question is: where do they go from here?

I theorized about Google launching Google Wallet services for OpenSocial in the future but for now it’s all theory. While the mission isn’t clear, Google has clearly succeeded at attracting developer attention.

Richard MacManus noticed an interesting phenomenon which has begun in the past few months: Google has been opening to bloggers and to developers. MacManus mentioned that both of these things suspiciously happened around the same time. This week the Google I/O Conference is taking place out west. The event was only announced a month ago making it difficult for people (including myself) to make it to the event.

What seems to be happening is that Google has finally realized that they are competing for developers’ time, even those that they are not employing. After seeing thousands of Facebook developers build over 26,000 applications in a year, it’s no wonder that the company has become heavily invested in the fight for developer attention.

It is a battle not just for developers but also for alliances of developers among the various clouds or numerous “miasma” as Bill Thompson describes. These virtual storage centers are becoming their own nation states seeking alliances with none other than the developers. It’s as if the developers will pledge their allegiance to a single company even though they are not employees of the company.

It’s a battle for the hearts of people like Jesse Stay who is probably one of the most enthusiastic developers I have met. If they can win the hearts of people like Jesse, who have figured out a way to survive by building applications on Google and Facebook’s platforms, they will be further along the path for dominance. It’s a battle over attention and it’s being fought in the media and at conferences. This is why Google has opened up and it’s why we will see the continuation of this open embrace of media and developers.

Yesterday afternoon Facebook announced that they would be leaving Facebook Friend Connect due to privacy issues. Ultimately the post sounded as though Facebook was concerned about users putting their personal data at risk. Well, Google has sent us a statement in light of Facebook’s decision:

We’re disappointed that Facebook disabled their users’ ability to use Friend Connect with their Facebook friends. We want to help you understand a bit more about what’s going on on the Friend Connect side with respect to users’ information.

User privacy is of the utmost importance, and Friend Connect was designed to strongly preserve it. The larger issue here is users’ control of their data. People find the relationships they’ve built on social networks really valuable, and they want the option of bringing those friends with them elsewhere on the web. Google Friend Connect is designed to keep users fully in control of their information at all times. Users choose what social networks to link their Friend Connect account to. (They can just as easily unlink it.) We never handle passwords from other sites, we never store social graph data from other sites, and we never pass users’ social network IDs to Friend Connected sites or applications.

For example, here’s what an application running on a Friend Connected site can access about a user, Joe, who has linked in his hi5 account:

7547238438 joe [picture] 9438265867 8348357012

Translation: Not much. A third party app has access to:
- Your Google Friend Connect ID. This is a number. It is not a name, and it is not your hi5 ID.
- Your friendly name that you entered into Friend Connect (or from hi5 if you didn’t).
- Your photo. And only if you’ve chosen to make that photo public on hi5.
- The Google Friend Connect IDs of any of your hi5 friends who are also members of this site. (NOT all of your hi5 friends. Not their hi5 IDs.)

That’s it. These apps have no knowledge of who these friends are. They have no access to additional profile data — yours or your friends’. No idea who else is on your friends list on your social network.

Google’s statement attempts to discount Facebook’s argument that data is insecure. What I think we are witnessing at this point is simply a battle of the PR teams at both companies. Google attempted to make an announcement that included Facebook for the soul purpose of discounting Facebook’s platform and making the playing field appear level.  At this point, it is now completely a PR battle which has been successful so far at generating a lot of buzz. We’ll see how long this lasts.

Google announced their new Friend Connect today and will be demoing it tonight at the Google Campfire event. While I won’t be present at it, I’m sure there will be plenty of bloggers covering it. Throughout the day I’ve been discussing this new service with other people in the industry including Frank Gruber who asks “How does Google Friend Connect put users in control?”

The reality is that it doesn’t give users much control as Marshall Kirkpatrick points out. The problem is that all applications are placed in iFrames which isn’t really a great solution for anybody. Personally I have high hopes for the upcoming Facebook Connect service but the problem still remains, users don’t really have the control. For Facebook Connect, Facebook gets to be the center of a user’s control. The same thing goes for Myspace’s new program.

But we are the users and we still want control. Well thanks to Snap!, I’ve got the power (hint: you too can have the power by watching the video below) but I don’t have control. This is a great move as all parties move forward. Unfortunately all parties are moving forward in parallel and with their own standards. They each want to control a user’s social experience on the web.

Myspace, Facebook and Google all may succeed at retaining some control but unfortunately it doesn’t make things easier for website owners who will have to choose which platform they will accept until someone makes it possible for all of the systems to work together. The next twelve months will be marked by the opening of these new standards and the launch of a variety of applications but it is still a short-term solution.

We are going to need to make these platforms work together if we’re going to succeed. Who do you think has the power with these new systems?

Caroline McCarthy has posted the details of a new foundation that has been set up to “support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year as a way to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites.” The purpose of the new organization is to spread the concept that OpenSocial is not being managed by Google but is instead being supported by the community.

My biggest problem with the standard so far has been that it’s not easy! There are multiple standards that must be supported to launch your application on MySpace and other social networks so far. It appears that this new foundation will focus on bringing together the community to help further the OpenSocial standard. A statement from Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management, said “The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open.”

The new foundation has the support of both Yahoo, Google and MySpace. This comes on the heels of the data portability news from Microsoft earlier this morning. Looks like the Google P.R. engine is in full swing. While I’m not sure about the significance of this news as it pertains to the future of the social web, this new foundation is paving the way for OpenSocial to become the social web standard as opposed to the licensing of the Facebook platform to other websites.

Caroline McCarthy does a wonderful job detailing the overall trend at tonight’s New York Advertising Meetup at Googleplex East: “Old media’s not dead, it just has to be Google-ized.” Over the course of an hour, Google executives from radio, print, search and agency relations discussed (read: pitched) their online and offline products to the Madison Avenue audience.

Granted the event was hosted on their turf, Google did have a right to pitch their products and talk up why a YouTube campaign may return the greatest ROI of all online initiatives. Sure, there were some blanketing statements like the one I just listed, but I couldn’t help think about spaces outside the dominant Google; of things that Google has yet to touch.

What about mobile? Yes, Google makes great mobile applications like Maps, Search and Reader but what about advertising? “None of us know what the [mobile] monetization models could be,” Derek Kuhl, Head of Agency Relations, admitted. In the US, search is king, expected to hit $1.4 billion in revenue by 2012 although three in ten mobile users recall seeing mobile advertising. Ouch.

Above: A pamphlet with a QR Code in the Google logo. Text reads, “Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. - Gore Vidal. ‘I hope it is the same half!’ Print Ads TGIAF at Hemisphere (Google’s NYC cafeteria) 1/31/08″

In the most subtlest of ways, Google introduced a comprehensive (what marketer’s like to call, “integrated”) mobile advertising initiative via a soon-to-be-announced product for Newspaper Print Ads: QR Codes. Already available and widely popular/useful in Japan, QR Codes will work in tandem with Google’s offline advertisements in newspapers. (Wait, I thought print was tanking?) Similar to a bar code on a cereal box, QR Codes are compact enough to store valuable information (think a website address or coupon). For Google, this means taking a text ad that was placed in print, utilize the corresponding QR Code and draw the reader to another destination.

This may seem menial in comparison to Android efforts, but Google’s foray (at least in the US) into mobile advertising via QR Codes changes the dynamic completely. As the sales and engineering teams test the product internally, expect the industry to steadily roll-out awareness programs and updated software for leading smartphones and the iPhone.

P.S. I also asked Kuhl if he or any other panel speakers had any update about Twitter-competitor Jaiku and (I guess) the answer was expected: “I don’t have any updates except that we acquired it.”

Update: Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider points to Google’s Print Ads barcode information website.

Last night, Google announced a new service called “knol,” part Wikipedia and part Mahalo. According to Udi Manber on The Official Google Blog, a “knol” or “unit of knowledge” was designed to act as retainer of authoritative information from trusted authors. Manber goes on to say:

“The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.”

Google’s approach to collaborative knowledge sharing is interesting and somewhat different to Wikipedia. (Remember, Wikipedia writers (largely) remain anonymous and open until proven named.) The idea of a completely open, authoritative and relevant information directory has consequences outside of what was originally intended, especially coming from the “pure” and “do-good” Google. Om Malik believes this is a further, definitive step toward a Google monopoly:

“Whether it will be successful or not, remains to be seen. Now if you think about it, knol despite its fancy name is nothing but a classic move by a quasi-monopolist who wants to ensure that they keep getting the raw material (in this case content on knols) for free, so that they can keep selling it at a premium. I stopped believing in Google’s “do no evil” ethos a long time ago….”

But for what it’s worth, the Google kingdom has been righteous and beneficial to many, especially those of the academy. (Think IT support and generous/intuitive email systems across campuses.) Imagine what will happen within the hierarchy of information at a university with the advancement of knols. Students and professors can continue the conversation from the classroom to the knol and then collaborate with others the world over. The knol architecture (as seen here) will offer a robust learning experience that creates a unique social dynamic.

Wikipedia will still be Wikipedia but the knol will become academia’s new best friend.