More Facebook user fail.

Facebook has decided to block its system from Google’s Friend Connect, citing privacy concerns.

Arrington calls it the beginning of “the social network wars“. Predictably, he cuts straight to the cynical biz play that others failed to mention:

This of course has nothing to do with the fact that Facebook launched their own nearly identically named product called Facebook Connect three days before Google’s Friend Connect.

It’s not clear exactly what features of Friend Connect justified the ban, since it is so similar to what Facebook announced on Friday. Both products allow the export of profile and friend list data to third party websites.

In the end though, this won’t be that big a deal simply because people desire the kinds of data (lists of friends, movies they want to see, pictures of last night’s party) that they put into Facebook to be portable, and that’s going to happen whether Facebook likes it or not. The technology is against them. Scoble points to the market’s first proof of this – a company with the maddeningly “Web 2.0″ name Minggl:

Me? I think Facebook has a point, but I think the horse is out of the barn already and Facebook won’t be able to shove it back in.

Why? You should check into Minggl. It’s a toolbar that does far more than what Google’s Friend Connect does.

But it does it in a way that Facebook will never be able to block. Why? Because it’s your browser that scrapes all your friend’s info into Minggl’s browser bar. That bar then uploads all that information back up to Minggl. There’s no way that Facebook will be able to block Minggl. If Google wants to push the issue they should do exactly what Minggl is doing.

This, as I’ve said before, is where the Google advantage lies. They’ve embraced openness in format, API philosophy, and protocol (CalDAV, OpenSocial, Jabber are examples of each) and just started building a bunch of useful services, throwing more resources behind one thing or another when it starts to stick to the wall.

What we’re seeing the beginnings of here with this Facebook dust-up is proof that a big part of the likelihood of success for any given app is based on the data portability, and there are very few corners of the Big G’s web empire that don’t have rich API access (Google Analytics, I’m giving you the stink eye here). That inspires people to use Google services more and more, simply because you can base other software around it.

Facebook’s problem?

• 1) they don’t have that killer-combo ecosystem of apps and personal productivity stuff
• 2) they’re not going to get it from the community of “Facebook developers” that has lurched into existence since they opened their architecture a year ago
• 3) they haven’t seemed to have developed an answer to the fact that their audience could evaporate as soon as someone puts together a slightly better mousetrap.

Facebook depends on a user’s desire to do their social networking through the Facebook app, within the strictures of the Facebook interface, following the rules of the Facebook universe. Problem is, social graph data is a lot more personal than that, and people are just going to want it to be portable. Period. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t have Minggl. (I hate typing that word).

As soon as people don’t have to use their data from within the sphere of Facebook itself, things start to go downhill for Facebook. Because there’s no other reason to use Facebook but Facebook. Google on the other hand can bring together a community of use around itself, making its docs and chat and email and calendar part of one grand information-sharing scheme that has elements of social networking.

Social networks are just a sort of design pattern for the web, like portals or – at perhaps a slightly lower level – forums. They’re not an end in and of themselves, and they certainly aren’t a business model for very long. They depend on audience, and Facebook is basically about as stable as a successful TV show. Once the creative minds stop hitting it, the audience will evaporate.