Facebook may be becoming a serious threat to Google with the ever growing number of users and popularity. Google seems to have decided to take a more active approach to combat what they call the “Facebook issue” by being more open than the Facebook platform. According to TechCrunch, this plant has been discussed behind closed doors at a meeting. The new initiative has been scheduled for as early as November 5 this year.

In short, there will be new APIs that will enable developers to leverage Google’s social graph data, starting with Orkut and iGoogle. This will later expand to include Gmail, Google Talk, as well as other G services in the future. Read in more detail here.

Google has already taken steps leading it into the social network realm by introducing Google Share Stuff. In this post I contemplated on what the future would be like if Google decides to make its own social network (or if it buys en existing one, like Facebook), and it seems the new open strategy is an introduction to something like that. In my opinion, Facebook is really not that open, being a platform that enables you to develop applications that can only be used within Facebook, so being more open that Facebook is not that big a deal. Since Google has had many more APIs open to the public, with much more functionality than those on Facebook, and with thousands of sites that generate (usually useful and interesting) content by using Google APIs exclusively, what Google needs to work on is the social networking side of things, and keep that open from the start. Maybe, if they give support to the open social graph initiative by making their APIs and services with the concept in mind, they can actually outperform sites like Facebook. Since Brad Fitzpatrick (ex Six Apart) now works for Google, this is probably happening anyway. If Google indeed integrates social networking into its existing services than there is little option for independent social networks except to participate as this will give them significant exposure.

Unless there are significant changes, November 5 will be the date to watch for a major announcement by Google.

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