Facebook’s Open Graph offers far more than the ability to “like pages.” It’s Facebook’s play to power the semantic web.

Facebook’s Open Graph can allow for deep personalization of any Open Graph-enabled content — content that reacts to your age, your gender, your friends, your personal preferences and even the things you “like.” The only thing required to fully achieve hyper-relevance would be understanding your location — but a soon-to-be-released update to the Open Graph API will allow developers to integrate location-based services into any website or mobile application. For example, imagine integrating Open Graph into Google’s search results and then think about what type of search results you might get back if you searched for “Caribbean vacation” and it knew that you were married, had two kids, lived in New York, were 34, had “liked” a Windsurfing Brand or a sport team, and were currently posting a search from your home address in the evening.

Facebook’s big mistake when rolling out the Open Graph was trying to hide what I believe is their true intention. They could have avoided the whole privacy debacle if they had asked consumers if they wanted to share some of their details with Open Graph “to allow for a new type of web experience that was truly personalized to their desires.” Many people would be willing to give up some of their privacy if they understood the upside. And those who didn’t could have been given the chance to opt out. They might be able to avoid the subject with consumers, but do they really believe their competition doesn’t see exactly what they’re doing?

Until early this week, I was wondering how Google would maintain their dominance in search if the key to the semantic web was effectively powered by social networks. I just couldn’t imagine Google wanting to leverage Facebook’s Open Graph to influence their search results and then Kevin Rose from Digg leaked that Google would be releasing their own social network called “Me.” I think Google’s true reasons for re-approaching social networks is because they recognize it’s a necessary component to achieving the next generation of search technology. And Orkut just didn’t get them there. As fascinating as it’s going to be to watch these two heavyweights duke it out to dominate our digital lives for the next 10 years, when I look at their past histories with privacy issues I can’t help but ask: should we be more scared than excited?

TechCrunch confirmed today that it’s not a rumor, it’s real.

D’Angelo, who was Facebook’s CTO for years, shared his thoughts as an answer to one of the questions on Quora. Here’s his response:

• This is not a rumor. This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this.
• They realized that Buzz wasn’t enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modeling it off of Facebook.
• Unlike previous attempts (before Buzz at least), this is a high-priority project within Google.
• They had assumed that Facebook’s growth would slow as it grew, and that Facebook wouldn’t be able to have too much leverage over them, but then it just didn’t stop, and now they are really scared.

Google has failed over and over again in providing any service that’s user friendly, i.e. Buzz, Latitude, Social Search, Google Friend Connect, Wave, Wave again, especially Wave … Though mark my words, Latitude will take off and will be base of amazing LBS services … Anyways, Google usually lacks of good design and usability, which makes it hard to believe they can compete with Facebook.

But the funny bit is that while Google is going after social networking, Facebook is making the move towards search. Shiv shared some thoughts on Facebook Search, and although I have some different thoughts, [Facebook] Open Graph is the beginning of a new semantic search that goes deep as opposed to broad and finds relevant content based on profile, location, and human recommendations.

So my predictions:

1. Google Me will have amazing technology, platform, have geo-social-mobile as a core, leverage elements from Latitude, Buzz, Open Social, and will be native to all new releases of the Android platform, including Google TV. Their success will rely on Google making a massive effort in making it usable, friendly, and having a good design.

2. Facebook will enter the search war, but not before they enter the display advertising arena. Search is a low priority as it provides less direct revenue opportunity for Facebook, whereas serving relevant context / social aware ads on 3rd party websites using the Facebook Open Graph provides a massive immediate revenue opportunity.

Thank you Gigaom

So I’m an iPhone user, and so are most of my friends … but I really think the new gold mine is Android; I was playing with the HTC Hero and Samsung Moment today, Droid Eric over the weekend, and can’t wait to get my hands on a Nexus One … With 50 new Android phones coming out this year, an open app eco-system, and 4G coming out this year, I really can’t wait to see the outcome …

Oh, I was playing with some custom phones I bought from China with Video conferencing over Wifi and it works awesome… so 4G/Wiki, Android OS, free cloud hosting, Google Voice / other VoIP providers … New communications are here, this will be an interesting year.