What should Facebook do about OpenSocial? Challenge Google?

This is definitely the question of the week. If people aren’t blogging about it, they’re definitely thinking about it: what is Facebook going to do? One step further: what would I do if I were Facebook?

Josh over at Netly News did some talking with people in “Techland” last night, including John Lilly, the COO of the Mozilla Foundation, about all this thinking. He came up with some interesting perspectives. Lilly in particular said something that I happen to agree with:

He said that if Facebook decides that it needs to move from FBML to HTML——”and I’m not saying I’d necessarily do that if I were Facebook”–but if he did, “I’d cause Google some problems first.” How? “If I were Facebook, I wouldn’t let Google say, ‘We are the Web.’ I’d call b.s. on them,” Lilly said. OpenSocial is a Google-run alliance; Google is calling the shots and is in charge of ensuring inter-operability. But that’s kind of bogus. Open standards initiatives tend to be run by open boards—look at the Mozilla Foundation, for instance.

Hang on a sec. That is kind of bogus. Sure, we all love Google, and their slogan might be “don’t be evil,” but doesn’t OpenSocial put the epicenter of social media development squarely in their lap? If I were Facebook, I might be going “OK, OK, fine, I can’t have it all in my lap. That wasn’t going to last anyway. But there’s no way I’m letting you move it all over to yours by calling it the middle.”

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