A new Google patent was approved last week which sounds eerily similar to my April fools joke earlier this year. The new patent is for, “A computer-implemented method for displaying advertisements to members of a network comprises identifying one or more communities of members, identifying one or more influencers in the one or more communities, and placing one or more advertisements at the profiles of one or more members in the identified one or more communities.”

It’s the exact type of technology that Jeremy Zawodny previously described as well as a number of other industry thought leaders. The new technology will be able to “identify the influencers from among the members of a community. This may provide advertisers with the option of targeting either all members in the community or advertising only on the profile of the influencer, thereby targeting the entire community.”

So how is Google going to leverage their new “FriendRank” (a name already trademarked by social ad network, SocialMedia) patented technology? Technically, the only social network they own is Orkut which is popular in countries that don’t have as large of advertising budgets as the U.S. Google also has an agreement to monetize MySpace as well so perhaps this new technology will be used to help monetize the under-performing inventory on the largest U.S. social network.

The new technology is clearly reminiscent of the personal CPM that I’ve previously discussed on both this site and AllFacebook. As the patent describes, “An influencer may receive financial incentives from advertisers in exchange for permission to display advertisements on the member’s profile.” The systems will also be used to help group individuals based on their shared interests and target them based on those interests.

This is something that Facebook already supports with their SocialAds service but one of the biggest downfalls is that some users may not update their interests. This system will theoretically encourage “members of communities in online social networks to enrich the content on their profiles. The presence of high quality content relevant to shared interests on a member’s profile increases the popularity of the member in the community and improves a member’s chances of being an influencer.”

Whether or not this system will provide a greater incentive than Facebook and other sites already provide is unknown but if updating your profile results in earning more money, I could definitely see this system working. Google has repeatedly stated that social networks continue to provide under-performing advertising inventory. Perhaps this is their solution to combat the problem.

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Today Google announced the redesign of their highly popular iGoogle start page. The start page will have a FriendFeed like feed that shows shared feed items from your contacts in Google reader, their recent photos uploaded to Picasa, Google Talk status messages and shared iGoogle gadgets. Sound familiar? It’s pretty much the same thing as other social networks except that your homepage is your startpage for everything.

Google has reduced the newsfeed down to a single feature. Honestly, this makes a lot of sense and I could see Google being successful with this strategy. The only downfall to the new startpage? Well, it’s limited to Google owned items. Currently there is no way to import activities that your friends are involved in else where on the web.

One other substantial addition is the creation of canvas pages for Google gadgets. That means that Google gadgets function similarly to Facebook applications as well as the new Google Friend Connect canvas pages. It appears that the concept of canvas pages has become pervasive throughout the social web. While I don’t know how many users interact with iGoogle on a daily basis, I know it is in the millions.

That means Google has now developed a way to compete directly with Facebook and other social networks for the first page someone loads when they sit down at their computer.

Google, once foreign to targeting based on social data, has launched Google Ad Planner. The service is targeted at media buyers and enables them to select ad placements on various sites based on demographic information as well as traffic data. Currently the service is limited to 4 types of demographic data: age, gender, education and household income.

Compare that to Facebook which currently offers targeting based on 8 variables: location, gender, age, profile keywords (found in interests, favorite music, movies and more), education status, workplaces, relationship status and what gender they are interested in dating. While Facebook offers more variables, Google’s information is broken down in to the categories most frequently targeted by media buyers.

The real question is if this is going to cut into Facebook’s ad revenue or prevent them from attracting marketers more effectively. Fox Interactive Media has a similar offering to Facebook’s called HyperTargeting which leverages MySpace profile to segment users. According to MySpace advertisers have been increasingly demanding HyperTargeting which has also been producing higher CPMs.

Google needs to figure out a way to capture some of this market and their new Ad Planner service appears to do that. While the social web continues to wait on a breakthrough advertising service, Google is using traditional advertising segmentation to make spending easier for media buyers. Do you agree that this new service will reduce the attractiveness of SocialAds?

Google has announced that seven new social networks in China have been added to the OpenSocial standard: 51.com, 51wan.com, Douban.com, Hainei.com, Tianji.com, Xiaonei.com and YiQi.com. These are all large social networks, one of which, Xiaonei.com, appears to be a direct rip off of Facebook. The company also recently raised $430 million making it better funded then Facebook itself.

I would imagine that any hopes of Facebook joining the OpenSocial movement have been eliminated for the time being with Xiaonei being announced as one of the large partners. As OpenSocial continues to expand its reach, the battle between the Facebook platform and OpenSocial continues. While most developers building on Facebook have been focused on the impending platform changes, OpenSocial developers have been hard at work trying to extend their reach with the launch of each new supporting platform.

OpenSocial has been extremely successful with gaining momentum recently announcing that MyAOL would be supporting OpenSocial and that more AOL products will also support the standard in the near future. If there is a lesson to be learned here, I’d say that Facebook needs to have a platform evangelist that also goes and pitches their platform to other sites. They are ultimately losing the battle to OpenSocial when it comes to platform adoption.

There has been little discussion surrounding yesterday’s Facebook announcement of fbOpen, the open-source version of the Facebook platform. Many have speculated about the intention of fbOpen and have boiled it down to a response to Google’s OpenSocial initiative. It is difficult to predict what will happen now that the platform has been open-sourced but it appears that Facebook has moved beyond licensing the platform and is instead making it a free-for-all so that developers can have their application run on other websites.

To me, Facebook’s release of their open-source platform is also an acknowledgment that the world does not just exist in blue and white (Facebook’s colors). So if Facebook knows that there is a world beyond their borders, why don’t they just support the OpenSocial initiative? Facebook claims that it’s because of privacy reasons but there has to be something beyond privacy that is really a concern for them.

Mike Arrington seems to think that it is a last ditch effort by Facebook to become the defacto standard of the social web. Unfortunately for Facebook I think it is a losing battle. At this point I’d say that the majority of users have picked their social network of choice and will use one site most often. Additionally, Facebook selected a somewhat restrictive license as Matt Asay points out.

As I wrote this morning though, all of this is ultimately a stupid, drawn-out game of chess (or poker). I wrote, “The reality is that Facebook will find that no matter how much money they have in the bank, there is no way that they can innovate faster than the overall market.” Facebook shouldn’t try to out smart Google and others by participating in their game.

Instead Facebook should simply open up and move on to the real issue at hand: figuring out a way to make money on social networks. After all is said and done we’ll all be singing O.A.R.’s “That Was a Crazy Game of Poker.”

Last week I spoke with Patrick Chanezon, evangelist for OpenSocial at Google. He speaks frequently at events around the country to educate people about how to take advantage of OpenSocial and a few of Google’s other products. I spoke with Patrick about the recent rifts between Facebook and Google, the future of monetizing OpenSocial applications and a number of other things.

While Patrick couldn’t speak about Google’s intention in providing monetization opportunities for OpenSocial applications, it is expected that Google will provide their own monetization solutions for OpenSocial apps. During our conversation Patrick discusses the benefits of Google Friend Connect and OpenSocial and addresses some criticism which has arisen over the new standard.

If you want to learn more about the OpenSocial program and where it is headed listen to our podcast. Also here is one of Patrick’s recent presentations on OpenSocial and Google’s various APIs.

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.