You know, I just realized I suggested that Facebook do exactly what it’s doing. Read this post from back in June, deconstructing an article in Wired about the emerging Facebook v. Google battle. In it I say:
I think it’s a major strategic mistake to not offer [as much information on Facebook as possible] to Google (and anyone else that wants to crawl it.) In fact, I’d argue that the right thing to do is to make just about everything possible available to Google to crawl, then sit back and watch while Google struggles with whether or not to “organize it and make it universally available.” A regular damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario, that….
The angle here is that Facebook, by making everything public, will force Google’s hand in search, and potentially dilute Google’s ability to compete in the social graph game (because Facebook will own the results on Google). If, on the other hand, Google decides to de-prioritize Facebook data in its results, Google’s brand will clearly be tarnished as favoring its own solutions (remember when Google announced its incorporation of Google accounts into search? Yep.)
Interesting. The chess is getting really interesting.