When I heard the news I was walking through San Antonio’s Hard Rock Cafe looking at Kurt Cobain’s high school photograph. Wow. FriendFeed was purchased by Facebook.

I quickly wrote a DM to Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor, co-founders and said “call me.” They did, and I got one of the first interviews.

This is poetry. It’s charmingly quotidian at the top (he talks about the Hard Rock Cafe like he’s at Buckingham, and he mentions Cobain’s picture because it’s some kind terrible whitebread muse-talisman to him), but then just after this “oh, me?” scene setting, Scoble is brief and devastating in his establishment of douchey dominance — explicit and unquestionable.

He is the man who will speak about this here internet thing AND tell you the dudes’ names AND tell you that he used to hang with them before this cool thing happened, BACK WHEN THAT OTHER cool thing happened or was happening.

He’ll show you wtf is going on in this world. We should wipe the snot from his camera for the chance to be here. Luckily he lets us listen in for free:

Basically they did not tell me much other than FriendFeed would keep on going on for the indefinite future.

Scoble, no worries. I wasn’t expecting real information and was just glad that you had the opportunity to write this gem. I stand here, in awe, clapping quietly in my dusty corner of the internet. Bra-fucking-vo.

The thrust of the new plan is that future changes in the Facebook agreements with users will be put up for open debate in a process of “notice and comment.” The forum will be open to all Facebook users. If Facebook proposes a modification to a term of service that is uncontroversial or has limited feedback, it will get incorporated into the user agreement after a stated period of time. But if there’s argument or division over a proposed change, users will be able to debate them and ultimately vote on updates to the Facebook agreements.

Wait a second… online communities? Voice of the people in the creation of a defined user-powered space? I’m feeling some deja vu here. Better keep reading:

Zuckerberg also made it clear that the new governance applied only to fundamental issues of privacy and data ownership, and not the Facebook product itself: “There will be hundreds and thousands of product changes going forward, and that’s not what we’re talking about. This is about the rules and framework.”

Ah. Ok. that was it – I was thinking about openness in general. His whole use of the word “open” just sent me down this road of thinking about openness of data and openness of software. I started to actually imagine a day when I might consider uploading some of my pictures to Facebook instead of Flickr and MobileMe and JungleDisk. But then that came crashing down when I realized how much smarter FB really is than the whole general macro trend of data ownership over the last quarter century.

The process of deciding how FB gets to keep and use your data is what you’ll get some buy-in on now, kids! Yay! Don’t worry about ever actually getting to talk about having your data open – if FB wants you to have that, you’ll get that! “Just trust us”! Yay!

No worries on Zuckerberg actually, you know, getting it any time soon, I guess.

If this doesn’t make any sense at all, then take this as a thesis: the net is gearing up to become one big data mashup orgy. Standards like HTML 5 and products like Safari 4 and Flex and Chrome and Google Site Creator are going to punch massive holes in the garden walls of places like Facebook over the next three years or so, rendering all their attempts at locking-in user data absolutely laughable. Before you know it, we’ll be passing around self-signed data stores as business cards, looking at browser-created custom mashups of information, and using Twitter to comb interesting and titillating information out of the cloud. Sure nerds do this already, but I’m talking about everyone else – that will just be how the internet is. Might we still use Facebook for social graph management? Sure – but only if it doesn’t insist on being the center of our universe. Stick that in your EULA, Mark!

I just have to wonder how hot FB really is if the VP of product management wants to leave. I mean maybe it’s just me talking from the worm’s eye view here, but if I were VP of product management for a company that people think is just super hot-and-sexy, I don’t think I’d want to give that up for a gig at a VC firm. Maybe I’m wrong — maybe it’s more fun to help pump $$ to marginally useful seeds in the rocky soil startups and drink lots of free drinks than it is to preside over the directionless morass that is Facebook’s product “strategy.”

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.

Google has opened up a sandbox for developers where they can try building some new types of iGoogle apps not available to the general iGoogle user population. Most significantly, they can add activity streams (i.e., updates) and friends lists in new navigation panes on the page. Any change in a third-party iGoogle widget will be able to be reflected in the updates pane. (This has actually been a long time coming, since adding activity streams was always part of the OpenSocial plan). And they can also play around with larger “canvas” pages that users can click through to from each widget for a full-page experience. How very Facebook of them.

I’ve written on this before. If I hadn’t had a bottle of vinho verde along with a sweet, sweet chicken dinner tonight, I’d probably write more. But for right now, all I’ve got to say is that I welcome our benevolent masters in this arena even more than I have in others.

But, as Levar Burton would say, you don’t have to take my word for it—check them out here.

But back to the festival. I’m rather chagrined to see that the follow-up to last year’s awesome Will Wright keynote (where we got to see him actually play Spore!) is an interview by over-hyped digital gift mogul Mark Zuckerberg. I call him a “digital gift mogul” because that’s all Facebook really sells. They just lost their “chief revenue officer” earlier this week, too. He says it’s because he wants to be a CEO, but I think it’s because he’s not interested in working for a company that covers its nut with nothing more than breathlessly-proffered VC and digital icons of Troll dolls and panties.

Anywho…Zuckerberg is a flavor of the month. Well maybe six months or so, but he doesn’t deserve to be the keynote speaker at SxSW Interactive. Especially when PC Magazine is putting out articles like this one, entitled “Facebook’s Death Spiral” just before the conference. A couple classes on graph theory and some regurgitated ideas that four or five other people have had before you does not a visionary make, and visionaries are who we’re supposed to have as keynote speakers @ SxSW. That’s a chair that’s been previously held by giants like Philip Glass, Malcolm Gladwell, Howard Rheingold, and Bruce Sterling. We’ll let Mark Cuban and Ana Marie Cox slip in under the door, even if they don’t really fit the mold. But even with them there, Zuck doesn’t belong in the club.

Calling Zuckerman a visionary for making Facebook after Friendster and MySpace (and a bazillion other, less famous general-purpose social networks) had been around for years is like comparing me to Merriwether Lewis because I drove from St. Louis to Montana in a Dodge Caravan. Sooner or later, Google will stitch together all their services, hire some badass interaction dudes like Adaptive Path or IDEO, and put Facebook out of their chumptastic misery.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here wondering if I can start an anti-keynote, like maybe at a 6th street bar, called something like “Let’s All List the Technical, Philisophical, and Interactional Reasons that Facebook isn’t Worth $15 Billion.”

I wonder how many people would show?

While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

It took Mr. Das about two months and several e-mail exchanges with Facebook’s customer service representatives to erase most of his information from the site, which finally occurred after he sent an e-mail threatening legal action. But even after that, a reporter was able to find Mr. Das’s empty profile on Facebook and successfully sent him an e-mail message through the network.

See? This is why I like Flickr for photos

Match My Friends™ allows anyone to quickly and easily create a profile for their friend and search for potential dates on their behalf–all without having to have a Match.com profile themselves. After receiving an invitation directly from their friend, the single friend then has the opportunity to enhance and approve the profile before it is ever posted on Match.com.

Watch this video introducing the feature–it’s pretty funny. Wendy, the “hot friend” never says a word, and the two married folk who do talk seem to spend a lot of time reassuring you that this isn’t for freaks and losers, and that neither you nor the potential other that your friends find will “end up on Match.com unless you both agree to.”

In any case, it seems a fantastic use of social networking–one of the first really decent ones I’ve seen. It’s well and good to have lots of digital buddies on Facebook to share photos and goof off, but connecting through friends for dating purposes might finally be the solution to the longstanding it’s-so-hard-to-meet-good-people problem, and therefore kick social networks up to a new level of usefulness.

If this is the only indication, I think the answer is yes. And I get that from one pesky statistic, the one that haunted web companies in the late 1990s: the price to earnings ratio. A p-to-e ratio tells what the market is valuing your stock at in relation to how much you’re earning. Here’s what the Wall Street Journal has to say on that front. Basically, they’re skeptical—even with the oh-so-sexy factor of actual profits emanating from FB:

That’s right, unlike past meteoric technology risers, the three-year-old company is actually profitable. Facebook’s valuation also equates to 100 times its $150 million of annual revenue. To put a valuation like that into perspective, if you slapped it on General Electric, the industrial conglomerate would have a market cap of $11 trillion, just $1 trillion short of the total U.S. GDP. Even America Online, the poster child for the late-1990s Internet excess, only sported a price-to-earnings multiple at its height of 232 times.

So we’re doing with Facebook 2x the p-to-e craziness we were doing with AOL in the late nineties? We have indeed learned nothing.