Facebook is a huge and rapidly growing walled garden ...

In a Thursday blog post, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington asserted, "Google may have just come out of nowhere and checkmated Facebook in the social networking power struggle."

Huh? Google released three APIs and signed up some partners for them. That's supposed to be checkmate, game over? Google just moved the pawn out in front of its queen.

No question, Google has lined up everybody else against Facebook and Microsoft. Alliances come and go, and this one is loose at best. Generally, the Web intelligentsia is way too gaga about OpenSocial and the whole social networking concept, for that matter. Last week's nuttiness about a ridiculous Facebook $15 billion valuation is this week's three-API epitaph. Somebody pinch me and say that it's not 1999.

Right now, social networking competition isn't game over. It's game barely started.

In the original Star Trek series episode "The Corbomite Maneuver," the Enterprise faces an enemy that it cannot defeat and a 10-minute countdown to destruction.

"Chess, when one is outmatched the game is over. Checkmate," Spock tells Captain Kirk.

Minutes later, following an argument with the ship's doctor, Kirk gets an idea. "Not chess, Mr. Spock. Poker. Do you know the game?" He then plays a bluff that saves ship and crew.

The technology business is a heck of a lot more like poker than chess and perhaps even more like Risk. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates surely has played a few bluffs in his day. Bluffs continue, which is why we occasionally post "Microsoft FUD Watch" (which will soon return from the hiatus caused by my move to San Diego).

A surprisingly good analysis of OpenSocial and its supporting consortia comes from Microsoft's Charles Fitzgerald. Or, maybe it shouldn't be so surprising, as he's Microsoft's platform strategist. Fitzgerald is a bit too cerebral for me, which is perhaps why I'm surprised by his analysis.

In a blog post earlier today, Fitzgerald asserted that the "sound and fury" of the OpenSocial announcement "actually underscores the weakness of the hand held by Google and their fellow travelers. While nominally about making it easier for developers to write widget applications that can be hosted across multiple sites, it really shows how few options Google has to try to deflate the twin nightmares that Facebook poses to Google."

He identified the, presumably fraternal, twins:

"Facebook is a huge and rapidly growing walled garden that Google can't index, provide search results about or sell ads against."

"The profile data of Facebook allows more targeted and therefore more lucrative advertising ... this puts Google's ad business at a disadvantage to ad systems that can take advantage of this information."

As I've repeatedly asserted, Facebook is more like an operating system in the cloud than a Web 2.0 service. No one should understand a "walled garden" better than Microsoft's GM of platform strategies. After all, what is Windows but a walled garden?

Google has performed quite a masterful magician's act or maybe the company knows something about poker and bluffing. The OpenSocial position is classic us versus them. But it's misdirection. Having a common set of APIs or communications or markup language, for that matter makes lots of sense from the perspective of informational openness and commerce across services. The concept is very Web 2.0. But that's not what Google is peddling here. What's open about the APIs released by Google? There is no open standard here for enabling connections among disparate services. The APIs are Google's intellectual property.

The walled garden is there, only bigger and surrounding more developers. Like Microsoft, Google is a platform provider. There is no charity here, no champion of openness.

I agree with Fitzgerald, who observed, "The fundamental problems are all the participants compete with one another and they're uniting around an admittedly least common denominator specification ... Like many announcements before it, you can bask in the 'openness' for a while, at least until business considerations kick in."

But there is a fundamental flaw in the OpenSocial strategy, in the thinking that the platform will bring end users and connect them across services. Fitzgerald explains, "Facebook's phenomenal growth curve predates its platform strategy." D'oh, he's absolutely right.

MySpace's adoption of OpenSocial is significant, because its huge user base also predates its forthcoming platform. Google needs MySpace and some of the other larger media companies. As for the smaller social networking services jumping on the OpenSocial bandwagon, they can fight for the table scraps falling from Google's plate.