Facebook is all about openess, right? And privacy. It’s a balance, or something. Oftentimes it’s a tricky balance, but Facebook has self-instituted standards to live up to. And those standards say that Google’s new Friend Connect is evil (in so many words).

As Friend Connect supposedly shares user data in a way that circumvents total disclosure to all users involved, Facebook has stated that Friend Connect does not comply with its standards for collecting user data and redistributing it across the web. The result? Friend Connect’s access to Facebook has been suspended.

So much for the web platform coming to fruition in an easy, cooperative manner. Google still has Microsoft and Yahoo to compete with on the search level, but when it comes to the development of open standards, MySpace, Facebook and Google have become the battling trio.

Between Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, and MySpace’s Data Availability on top of existing open platforms, the race is on to become the dominant, most widely adopted platform for such open standards. It’s quite dizzying at this point, and not so cooperative after all. Facebook has stated that it’s reached out to Google in order to find a way in which to reach a satisfactory level of compliance, so hopefully that will happen soon. Google does, after all, have a burning desire to own the universe’s data.mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/facebook-blocks-friend-connec/

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