Since yesterday’s announcements from Google and Facebook (a couple of hours apart) that they would both make their social ID standard available to all sites, the (micro)blogosphere has been quite active to look at the merits of each solution and try to predict who will emerge victorious.

Social data standards are paramount to TRAACKR and we’d like to chim in with our own point of view on the suject. So, Facebook or Google? WHO CARES??!?

No, seriously, who, outside of Facebook and Google, cares? We should just all be happy that this arm wrestling between the 2 giants is taking place because it means that standards are indeed converging, which is really all that matters.

Why should there even be 1 single standard? We tend to forget that the “winner takes all” approach to Web businesses doesn’t always hold true, far from it.

If OpenID and Facebook Connect are both adopted widely, it won’t be long before some small genius businesses (like yours truly) start building bridges between the major standards to unify them. I’d just be content  if we’re left dealing with only 2!

We only wish for this battle for standards to expand in scope and start including more social data types than basic social network info. It’s undoubtely the way it is going and the fact that both Google and Facebook are leading the charge will only accelerate this trend.

So our opinion on this? Keep on the good fight!

Tags: api, facebook, facebookconnect, google, openID, standards

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 4:55 pm and is filed under We Search, We Score, We Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.