Facebook hosted the finals of its Camp Hackathon competition last night through today, featuring a face-off between winners of smaller hackathons on five college campuses. Young developers came to Facebook headquarters to create new applications in one night, where they would be judged by Facebook leaders including vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer, director of design Kate Aronowitz and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook engineers were on hand through the night helping teams surmount development obstacles. Each team was also mentored by an alum from their school who is now an engineer for Facebook.

The event was more casual than most at Facebook. Paul Tarjan, leader of the Camp Hackathon project, unicycled into the conference hall to start the prototype forum. The teams were surprisingly candid in their five minute presentations, discussing the development process, bugs, and things they couldn’t figure out how to build.

Here are the five teams, and what they created:

University of Texas, Austin – Fancy Checkin Stuff

The app allows users to check in to mark their territory, and view a map of which areas of their town they control. The creators explained that the game was designed to “compel you to socialize and meet your neighbors while wandering your town.”

University of California, Berkeley – Foto Inquest

A Facebook Photos search engine which allows users to search for photos by tags, and watch a slideshow of photos returned. Photos with more people tagged are displayed for longer, making the slideshow personalized based on the actions of your social network

Georgia Tech – FbMarks

A bookmarking system where you can bookmark any wall or news feed story. A bookmarking star appears next to each story which users can click to add that story to their bookmarks which can be accessed through a tab on Facebook’s top navigation bar. Bookmarks can be arranged into a playlist, allowing users to watch all their bookmarked videos or listen to all their bookmarked songs, turning Facebook into a passive content consumption channel. The app brings the favorites functionality of Twitter to Facebook, making it easy to return to content you don’t have time to experience when first discovered.

University of Illinois – AirChalk

An augmented reality app where users can use their phone to draw on a display, similar to a virtual white board. A phone’s camera can track a wand for drawing, or the phone itself can be used to control the cursor. Multiple users can collaborate and draw on the same canvas. While an interesting idea with great potential as mobile phone image recognition and accelerometer technology improves, the only Facebook integration is a Like button on the app’s home page.

University of Wisconsin, Madison – Cacophony

A top-down music shooter which turns different sounds into targets the user can shoot. The 80′s-graphic engine style generates polygon targets and sets trajectories based on tempo and the music’s wave form.  The Facebook integration allows users to compare high scores with friends. This independent game could become a compelling, shooter version of Guitar Hero with some polish.

Overall, we see FbMarks as the most universally useful application. We’ll update in a minute once the winner has been selected.

And The Winner Is…

Despite only a minimal Facebook integration, University of Illinois’ AirChalk won the Facebook Camp Hackathon. Mark Zuckerberg said that team members Islam and Hani Sharabash had an “interesting vision of how the app could be used in the future, though since there is the option to collaboratively draw, I thought you’d allow users to invite their friends.”

Still, the team’s app was the most ambitious of the entrants, and Facebook rewarded the two brothers with not only the official prize of $500 Amazon gift certificates, but a summer internship at Facebook. The Sharabashs cried out in joy upon hearing they’d get to spend more time with the company.

When asked how it was getting help on their app from Facebook’s engineers, Hani said “They’re like the brightest people in their field, they’re very social, awesome personalities. Tarjan was so down to earth. He folded up our paper tracker so we could have more time to code. The environment here is just awesome.” The team hopes to release their application publicly, and “ask people how they want to use it.”

Facebook’s Tarjan said that one of the best parts of watching the young teams during the development process is the “amazing ability to get feedback on the product…watching their pain points makes my role [on the Platform team] easier.” Of the university Hackathon program, he said “it’s a great recruiting tool and a great branding tool as well. I want students to think Facebook is THE cool place to work.” As for the future of apps created during the Hackathon, “the app is not the goal, the experience and the learning is the goal.”

Users interested in watching the presentation and judging of the hacks can check out the stream via Facebook Live.

Paul Buchheit, an early Google employee who coined its “Don’t be evil” motto and created Gmail, is moving on from Facebook to become a partner at startup incubator Y Combinator.

Buchheit joined Facebook in August of last year when the social network acquired his social sharing service FriendFeed. Buchheit confirmed publicly that he was leaving the company on his FriendFeed page.

“It has less to do with Facebook and more to do with me,” Buchheit wrote. “I’m just more excited about helping new entrepreneurs create the next Facebook or Google.”

He also leaves shortly after Facebook initiated a partnership with YCombinator to provide technical and design resources to new social startups.

Facebook said in a statement: “We support Paul Buchheit’s decision to pursue his passion and advise start-ups full-time. While he’ll be missed at Facebook, Paul has already established himself as a respected angel investor and we hope his insights will be helpful to the next generation of Silicon Valley start-ups.”

Facebook typically acquires small companies purely for talent, instead of for their products. As Buchheit leaves, his original Friendfeed co-founder Bret Taylor has moved on to take a high-profile role within Facebook as the company’s chief technology officer.

At least a quarter of FriendFeed’s original employees have left since the company was bought for a reported $50 million last year. Kevin Fox stayed at Facebook for 10 months before leaving and eventually joining Mozilla Labs as principal user experience designer. Another employee Ben Darnell left three months after the acquisition to join Brizzly, which was later bought by AOL.

Buchheit is a much higher-profile departure because of his Google background, because he’s a thought leader in Silicon Valley and an active angel investor. He also leaves as Facebook is possibly preparing to launch its own e-mail service next week in San Francisco.

While at Facebook for more than a year, neither Buchheit nor the company was completely clear about what his title or role at the company was, although he says he made a few changes to the search engine a few days ago. At the same time Buchheit became busier investing and mentoring young founders, and scored some exits with Mint, Remail and Appjet.

Multiple sources have been saying for weeks that a new Facebook email service, dubbed “Project Titan” internally, is coming soon. And with the company’s invite to an event in San Francisco on Monday featuring an “Inbox” logo in the email, it seems to be hinting at it too.

So, here’s the latest we’re hearing.

Users’ vanity URLs are probably the first part of the email address, like what MySpace provided when it launched its email program last year. But it’s possible that the domain could be something shorter than vanity@facebook.com, like @fb.com.

The domain fb.com is registered by brand protection firm MarkMonitor and its owner is concealed. In September, DomainNameWire reported that the previous owner of fb.com, the American Farm Bureau, sold the address to an unknown owner. MarkMonitor has also represented high-profile clients like Google and Apple in the past.

There are other shortened domain possibilities. Fbmail.com is registered by web hosting company Dotster, Inc., while fmail.com is owned by another domain reseller Tucows., Inc. Tucows has represented Dell in the past.

Facebook could own some or all of these, but may or may not use them. It also owns fb.me, which it has used as a URL shortener for links on mobile devices.

The company has so far given @facebook.com accounts to employees. It might switch them to shorter domains, in order to give users the full Facebook name. It could also do what MySpace did, and give its employees a longer doman, such as ___@facebook-inc.com

We covered some ways that Facebook could potentially add email to its Messages system yesterday. But we can also think of a few broader implications for the ecosystem:

1) How will developers take advantage of Facebook email as a new stronger viral channel to reach users? For the past year, developers have had to grapple with weaker viral channels as Facebook shut down notifications from apps to users, pressuring larger social gaming companies to depend more on advertising to find new users. The company has also encouraged third-party developers to ask for user email addresses directly, so it wouldn’t have to be the middle-man in app spam and suffer potential ill will. A facebook.com email address would give developers new opportunities to reach out to users directly.

2) Facebook will finally have most of the tools necessary to track strong ties as well as weak ones. For years, the company has touted its product as a way for users to keep in touch with hundreds of friends and strengthen so-called weak ties, or distant acquaintances. But the friends a user interacts with don’t necessarily correlate with what their closest friendships really are. With the introduction of Places and Groups, the company is now collecting the data to see who a person really spends time with or who they think is important enough to include in a small group of friends. Email adds another layer on top of this; who a person privately emails regularly is a stronger signal of a deep relationship than who they tend to comment on or like.

3) Facebook will have to come up with a new justification for blocking Google from importing its contact information. For the past week, Facebook and Google have been embroiled in a rather ugly public fight over whether the social network should reciprocate and let users export their friends’ email addresses to Gmail. Facebook responded that because it’s a social network, data ownership is different — users own their own information, but they do not own the information of their friends. If Facebook makes an entry into the email space, it will either need to let users export their friends’ email address or it will need to explain itself and its double standard for data portability.

Lastly, Facebook could tie email in with a broader suite of products from third parties — like what it’s rumored to be doing with Microsoft’s Office Web Apps.

Games fill all five of the very top spots on this week’s AppData list of emerging Facebook apps, defined as those still under a million monthly active users. But a few interesting non-game apps are growing as well, a bit further down the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Hollywood City	651,876	+574,247	+740%
2.	Pogo Games	845,948	+311,542	+58%
3.	恐龍王國	916,042	+297,423	+48%
4.	Vegas City	364,988	+288,420	+377%
5.	Island God	237,104	+234,702	+9,771%
6.	Intelligent Elite	629,382	+232,555	+59%
7.	Vegas	657,593	+224,788	+52%
8.	Bubble Paradise	673,284	+193,882	+40%
9.	CSI: Crime City	751,403	+186,258	+33%
10.	TravBuddy.com Countries Visited Map	590,973	+164,059	+38%
11.	Shoot-It!	217,117	+161,876	+293%
12.	FameTown	265,481	+161,021	+154%
13.	friend.ly	464,715	+159,024	+52%
14.	באבלס	161,142	+145,061	+902%
15.	Game of Truth	148,938	+138,042	+1,267%
16.	Prizee Jackpot	546,657	+137,932	+34%
17.	Profile Stats	364,316	+131,323	+56%
18.	How Much Do You Swear?	336,753	+130,518	+63%
19.	Sunny Beach	562,226	+127,699	+29%
20.	แฮปปี้เกาะ	240,746	+124,061	+106%

Hollywood City has added over half a million new users to Digital Chocolate, which also has Vegas City and Island God on the list. The first two are reskins of Millionaire City, while Island God is new. Digital Chocolate has been on a tear over the past month or so; it has another new game just out, called Epic Fighters, which resembles its game MMA Pro Fighter.

Pogo Games is also worth a look. This Electronic Arts portal leads to a number of casual games, like other portals, but EA owns enough well-known IP to make its offering significantly different.

Intelligent Elite is the list’s first non-game app. The app uses IQ and EQ (emotional quotient) tests to draw users in; when they’re done, they’re directed on to membership at the Intelligent Elite website, which bills itself as a dating site for smart folk.

Moving down, TravBuddy.com Countries Visited Map follows a well-worn path, having users mark where they’ve been on a world map. And friend.ly, the last app we’ll point out, is a connection tool for Facebook users to find people they don’t know in real life — something the social network itself has generally tried to avoid.

January 25th | San Francisco

As we announced two weeks ago, Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, our second conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is happening January 25th in San Francisco. We’re excited to see all of the developers and entrepreneurs from around the world that are planning to attend!

The agenda topics for Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 are now live online. Executives and experts from Facebook, leading social networks, mobile platforms, social game and app developers, media companies, virtual goods and payment services, and investors will be discussing the future of social platforms and virtual goods monetization in social apps and games from a global perspective.

Finally, if you’re considering attending Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, take advantage of early registration pricing and sign up now. A limited set of early registration tickets are currently available at the Early Announcement price of $229. This price will be good through Friday November 12th only, so we encourage you to register now.

Who’s Speaking?

We’re honored to present the following 17 confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011:

	Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook		Eric Chu Group Manager, Android Platform, Google
	Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam		Vish Makhijani SVP Business Operations, Zynga
	Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom (now part of Disney), and Investor		Peter Relan Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
	Rex Ng Co-Founder and CEO, 6waves		Deborah Liu Commerce Product Marketing, Facebook
	Sean Ryan EVP and GM Games, News Corp		Bill Gossman CEO, hi5
	Sebastien de Halleux Co-founder and COO, Playfish (now part of Electronic Arts)		Manu Rekhi GM Games and Platform, MySpace
	Atul Bagga VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity		Jason Oberfest VP Social Apps, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
	Raph Koster VP Creative Design, Playdom (now part of Disney		Eric Eldon Editor, Inside Network
	Justin Smith Founder, Inside Network

Key topics for the day will include:

• Growth and User Aquisition on the Facebook Platform
• New and Alternative Social Platforms: Where Do Opportunities Lie?
• Monetization on Facebook in a Credits World
• Growth and Monetization on Mobile Social Platforms
• M&A Landscape for Small & Midsize Developers

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 – January 25th in San Francisco

Social applications first emerged in 2007, and are today maturing into a global media ecosystem. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, followed by platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible.

Now, three and a half years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry, punctuated by numerous major acquisitions by the world’s leading media companies and developers. But now, new challenges are emerging, affecting big players and new entrants alike.

Inside Social Apps will investigate the latest trends and challenges for social applications, and look at what’s to come for developers throughout the space – including the growth of virtual goods and social applications on mobile devices.

What are the biggest uncertainties and opportunities facing the future of social games and applications in 2011, and who is leading the way?

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 takes place January 25th, 2011 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, and brings together the world’s leading entrepreneurs to weigh in on the future of social app and game monetization.

Inside Social Apps will be a one-day summit led by Inside Network’s Eric Eldon and Justin Smith, and will take in-depth investigative approach to the day’s discussions. At Inside Social Apps, Inside Network will work alongside founders and executives of the top social networking, social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies to analyze the most important issues affecting the industry. Inside Social Apps is geared towards developers on Facebook, iPhone, Android, and emerging online social platforms.

Inside Social Apps will be a content-rich day of critical discussion, followed by an evening and nighttime of casual networking.

Register Now

A limited set of “Early Announcement” tickets is available through Friday at a special price of $229. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on January 25th in San Francisco!

Some interesting new job posts from Facebook’s Career Page have come up since the last time we looked at Facebook’s Careers Page.

Perhaps most intriguing is a post for a Intellectual Property Counsel. The hire will work closely with the company’s brand marketing team, as well as to oversee “outside counsel handling trademark prosecution, enforcement, and IP litigation.”

Facebook has been busy filing for and receiving patents for features like the news feed, but so far it has hinted that it doesn’t plan to aggressively enforce this IP. However, it has a long track record of going after companies that use the “____book” term and other types of alleged trademark infringements — the counsel position promises more of the same focus.

Specific duties listed in the posting include: The prosecution of Facebook’s trademark portfolio, intellectual property litigation, trademark and domain name enforcement, licensing of the company’s trademarks and copyrighted content, assistance with IP guidance in commercial transactions and support for product teams.

Requirements include four to eight years of experience, knowledge of “web 2.0 and social networking” and a law degree from “a top law school.”

Public Policy Communications

Facebook is also looking to increase its public policy communications team in the US and around the world. In addition to outstanding postings for public policy positions in Washington, DC and India, it’s trying to fill a new position in Europe: “an experienced Manager, Privacy and Policy, to monitor legislative and regulatory matters at EU and member state level, participate in policy discussions, and lead the company’s interactions with the European Commission and governments in several EU countries.”

Governments across the world, including the US, EU and India, are scrutinizing Facebook’s privacy and security practices more closely.

Marketing and Sales

Facebook’s post for a Marketing Campaign Manager was also interesting. The company is looking for someone to manage one of the largest advertising accounts — Facebook’s own, in-house campaigns. The person filling this position will work with many teams within Facebook and also external partners, such as child safety organizations, non-profits and voter registration groups.

Ideally the candidate is an “on-person ad agency.” The part-time contractor position of 25-30 hours a week is for the the company’s Palo Alto, Calif. offices. Facebook is looking for someone with three to five years of experience who has basic graphic design, copywriting and other pertinent skills.

Facebook also recently listed a number of sales account executive listings for positions in Palo Alto and its Austin, Texas office in the areas of: Entertainment, financial services, gaming, retail, services and travel.

In terms of other listings, Facebook continues to try to fill a wide range of engineering and product jobs — although we haven’t seen any significant new posts in these areas for some time.

For more Facebook-related jobs, check out the Inside Network Job Board.

Facebook has invited members of the press to an event this coming Monday, and the invite email included the Facebook Messages looks icon. Given the existing rumors about a Facebook email service, and hints that some sources have given us, here’s a look at what might be launching on Monday.

Referred to as “Project Titan” among Facebook employees, the email revamp could address criticism about deficiencies in the existing Messages product such as lack of easy forwarding, mass “mark as read”, and attachment uploading. More significant would be giving users an @facebook.com email address to which email could be sent and read within the messages product, as well as POP and IMAP support for reading your Facebook inbox from other email clients.

A more full-fledged email product, especially one without POP or IMAP-support, would reduce the reliance of Facebook users on Gmail and other email services, bringing email’s extended time-on-site to Facebook. It would also further bind users to Facebook for the long term.

Facebook has made only limited forays into email to date. In October, it launched Groups, which aimed to be an elegant replacement for email lists by allowing users to set up Group email addresses to which emails could be sent. creating a persistent record of posts in the Groups feed. However, many users felt overwhelmed by the volume of email notifications they received since the product defaulted to email users about every action taken within the Group.

At the beginning of 2010, Facebook shut down the applications notifications system and as a replacement began allowing application developers to send users email. This change was in part designed to move spammy or low content messages off of Facebook and onto email, redirecting the ill will and labor associated with seeing these messages away from Facebook.

One question will be where notification and applications emails will go in the new Messages product. Some users might prefer to keep all Facebook-related communication within Facebook, which could be facilitated with the option to sort a single Messages inbox by types such as one-to-one from a friend, one-to-many from friends, Events, applications, and notifications.

Among other possibilities, a way to highlight one-to-one messages would be especially useful since they are more often important, timely, and require a response then other messages. Facebook created an Unread Messages sidebar module in an attempt to remind users to check their Messages, but more often the problem is that users read a one-to-one message, can’t respond immediately or don’t have a reply yet, but then forget to reply at all. This broken sequence has probably thwarted many potential business relationships and romances.

We’ll be at the event Monday with live coverage and analysis to let you know whether the update will be more of a user interface change or the addition of truly new functionality. If Facebook does distribute email addresses to users, maybe it will have something to export back to Google after all.

Facebook announced plans today to open a second data center in Forest City in Rutherford County, North Carolina. The company said in a press release that the move is part of a policy of moving user data from leased data centers to cost-effective, customized facilities.

A press release from North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue notes that Facebook is set to invest $450 million initially in the new facility, which will take 18 months to construct.  During construction, about 250 construction and mechanical jobs are to be created, and once construction is complete, about 35 to 45 full-time and contracts jobs will be created, the press release noted.

Governor Perdue said in the release that she’d been working with Facebook for a year to bring the project to fruition. Earlier this year Facebook announced it would be building its first data center in Prineville, Oregon. In past years, the company has relied on rented facilities more heavily.

Environmental activist group Greenpeace has targeted Facebook already for its Oregon center. That facility is on an electrical grid that relies somewhat more heavily on coal than the national average — 58% versus 50%. The North Carolina facility, powered by Duke Energy, also appears to be beating the national average for coal consumption, at nearly 55%, although the utility has emphasized that it is working to increase the portion of renewable energy. Greenpeace has some more fuel to go after Facebook with.

But as has been with the Oregon data center power source issue, Facebook is emphasizing all of the extra things it does to save energy. From the press release:

In keeping with North Carolina’s growing reputation for environmental leadership, the building will be designed to LEED gold standards. In addition, Facebook will employ innovative cooling and power management technologies to make the facility one of the most energy efficient data centers in the United States.

Facebook is also a leading pioneer in efficient software and facility will use technologies developed by Facebook to rely on fewer than half the computing power (and related energy consumption) that a similar data center would have required only a few years ago.

For updates and information about the Rutherford Data Center, see its Facebook Page.

[Image via Rutherford Data Center Facebook Page]

In an effort to capitalize on the popularity of virtual goods and the buzz around Facebook Places, Starbucks has created its own Facebook app which rewards users with virtual cups of coffee for checking in to Starbucks locations. However, Starbucks Check In is slow or inaccurate at tabulating check-ins, and the virtual goods are not currently compelling.

The app shows that brands can’t just rehash existing trends and technologies in order to gain exposure or improve brand perception. Meanwhile, Starbucks is running a more enticing promotion through Facebook Deals, where the company will donate $1 (up to $75,000) to Conservational International to help protect forest land.

While the Starbucks Check In app promotion seems unlikely to succeed, Starbucks has a strong track record on Facebook. Last year, Facebook gave it a “Blue Ribbon” award for its excellence in use of its Page. An hourly limited giveaway of branded ice cream, with coupons for those who missed the promotion helped Starbucks become the first brand to reach 10 million Likes. It currently has one of the largest Pages on Facebook, with 16.9 million Likes, according to our PageData tracking service.

When users install the new app, they’ll first see a count of their check-ins to Starbucks, though only check-ins made after installing the app are counted. Below this is a “What your friends are up to” feed, which really just shows what Starbucks locations a user’s friends have checked in to. The counter and feed are broken, though, often not registering check-ins at all, or taking nearly 24 hours to do so. The lack of a proper feedback mechanism is frustrating, and probably leads users to tune out.

In the middle of the app, users see a list of gifts they can unlock and share by checking in to multiple different Starbucks locations, checking in at a certain time, or checking in multiple times in one day. The gifts are just pictures of holiday-themed paper coffee cups, and are neither cute, cool, nor functional. When shared or automatically published upon being earned, there is no interesting text about the good, only a pitch for others to install the app.

One positive aspect of the app is that it includes a FAQ section explaining how Places works for those unfamiliar, and an option to turn off automatic stream publishes upon a user earning a gift. The right side of the app is taken up by a location leaderboard showing which Starbucks stores have received the most check-ins. Predictably, all three current leaders are in smartphone-obsessed California, with two near Silicon Valley.

This poorly executed promotion is atypical for Starbucks. If a virtual good doesn’t help the user, such as granting them abilities in a social game, it should at least be fun to look at. Of the nearly 300 comments on Starbucks Page’s announcement of the app, none seemed excited about the goods, and many asked why the company wouldn’t give users something useful like a coupon in exchange for visiting the business and publishing the Starbucks name to their feed. We’re asking the same question.

For more on how to use Places, Pages and other Facebook features for marketing, be sure to check out our Facebook Marketing Bible.

Once again, Facebook and Google are posturing in the long-brewing debate over openness and data portability.

The latest round was triggered on Friday after Google changed its terms of service, asking that Facebook offer reciprocal access to data when the social network’s users import their contacts from Gmail. Facebook responded with a run-around; users can manually download their Gmail contacts and then re-upload them to the social network. Without banning the practice, Google responded with the rather passive-aggressive prompt below.

The very public skirmish comes as Google is building its own competing social product and has made a series of acquisitions to incubate other social projects, although sources say the company’s internal bureaucracy has made progress difficult.

Google has accused Facebook of being a “data dead end” that traps information collected from third parties. Facebook argued back that it has one of the most widely used APIs on the web and that the friend lists it shares have seeded hundreds of thousands of applications.

How Facebook, Google Strategically Employ Openness

Openness is a political term. Tech companies go out of their way to tout openness because it helps them attract developers, who fuel the value of their platforms. They want the advantages of openness without the risk of commoditizing their technology in the same way that governments want the benefits of free trade without the risk of destabilizing political rule as less competitive industries lose.

Google is open, but only in areas that are accessories to its core businesses of search and display advertising. It open-sources Android and Chrome, but does not share the formula that powers its search engine. It also uses openness and free products to undermine competitors who don’t have the scale, talent or capital to compete.

Facebook is open, but only if it is the middle-man and if its partners do not have the size or technical capability to build competitive ecosystems. It has cut off Google before; in 2008, Facebook blocked Google’s Friend Connect service from accessing its user data.

At first, Facebook’s access to Gmail users’ contacts was not a threat; years ago, Google’s senior management dismissed social networking as technically uninteresting and as a trivial fad. But as the social network has grown, so has the protected part of the web it controls and collects data from. Furthermore, Facebook is now positioned to one day launch products that could be competitive to AdSense or AdWords, Google’s key revenue streams.

Sources familiar with Google’s thinking say there was no specific trigger for the change in the company’s terms of service, except that the search giant had long tried to use the “carrot” to encourage reciprocity from Facebook. But now it was time to use the “stick.”

More than 550,000 applications depend on the Facebook Platform. But integrations with big partners like Twitter and Apple have stalled, purportedly because of issues with technical capacity. The company has also stopped short of allowing full export of data. Its new “Download Your Information” product, which lets users store a copy of their information locally, omits friends’ email addresses among other key pieces of data.

Facebook argues that it cannot pass email addresses of a users’ friends because it has — quite legitimately — privacy issues. On one side, legislators and mainstream media outlets like The Wall Street Journal have called the company out for not cracking down on developers who pass along or sell user information. On the other side, it is criticized in the technical community for not making it easy enough for users to export their information.

Yet, as SearchEngineLand’s Danny Sullivan points out, Facebook does export e-mail addresses to other partners like Microsoft and Yahoo. Facebook is willing to have double standards with other large companies that have established reputations and pose no legitimate threat to their core business.

Neither Google nor Facebook is entirely innocent. What is unusual is about this spat is how public it is. Google has finally made a very calculated decision to publicly call Facebook out on its double standards.

As the two increasingly joust over talent, users and advertisers, expect more impressive acrobatics from both over the meaning of “openness.”

Comparing Recent Public Statements from Facebook and Google

Google, when it originally changed its terms of service. The company asked that Facebook offer its users the opportunity to send their contacts back to Gmail: