Facebook VS Google: The Battle for the Web 3.0?

Earlier this year, we heard some interesting statements from Mark Zuckerberg, founder of FaceBook as he talked about being the "Operating System" for the Internet. The concept was that as more people adopt Facebook, and by opening Facebook to enable third party application development on their platform, they could in theory, host the majority of the Internet experience.

Many had written Mark off already, as evidenced by his presence on Business 2.0's (a CNN magazine) "10 People who don't matter" list in 2006. But.... Perhaps, Mark's turn-down of $1B+ from Yahoo! was a wise move. If his vision holds out, Yahoo could be an "application" on Facebook. Recently, the discussions around Microsoft acquiring a 5% stake in FaceBook for $500M would estimate the total work to be approximately $10B. Some might now be asking.... Does Business 2.0 (a CNN magazine) matter?

But then along came Google...

According to TechCrunch, Google will launch a set of API's on November 5th that will allow developers to leverage Google's social graph data (data about your social network/relationships). Starting with it's social networking application, but potentially harnessing all of it's applications. That level of social intelligence could start to create a very different type of social Internet experience.

Think about that for a minute... Eek... Did you just get the shivers?

I guess we'll see on November 5th whether Google is serious about being an alternative to the Facebook OS. Perhaps this is the foundation to which the battle of for the Web will be played.