Michael Arlington reports that Google are to 'address the Facebook issue' with a series of new services for developers. It seems they will do their best to provide a social graph of 'who knows who' from their various services. I've suspected for some time that they would attempt something like this.

Apparently "If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be 100% open". That sounds far-fetched. I guess they're just talking about the social graph. Google is not about to be 100% open in areas where it leads. That would mean they release the source code behind their search engine, and let people use their search engine without credit or any kind of link-back.

Google won't be fully open in search, but they can afford to be very open in Facebook's domain. By releasing free data and services they can encourage developers to build around and help Google, rather than Facebook. They could also force Facebook to be more open (for example, letting developers keep long-term local copies of Facebook data for use outside Facebook). Google can't hope to make much money in Facebook's domain, so maybe they choose to use openness to reduce the potential for Facebook? That would be good for users, but will it be seen as anti-competitive?

Attention of users on the Internet is highly fragmented, and links between companies are cheap. We're only just starting to see the creative ways that companies can open their data, services and source code for competitive advantage.