It may sound weired, but Facebook and iPhone could actually help polarization of most of the companies in the field of social networking and mobile towards OpenSocial and Android. There is something similar between Facebook and iPhone as of now, which is both are closed and use proprietary technologies - the new initiatives from Google are aimed at addressing (and encashing!) this situation.

Many users have expressed their opinions against closed nature of iPhone and the way firmware upgrade made the hacked iPhones useless. In fact, this had led to companies like Nokia trying to encash restrictive nature of iPhone using their “Open to Anything” campaign. This indicates that those who don’t like iPhone to further increase it’s market share will be open to supporting Android.

Similarly, Facebook definitely has a lead in the social networking space, which has led to all it’s competitors including MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn to join hands together and support OpenSocial platform.

If there was no clear leader in these two areas, then these two announcements possibly won’t have made as much buzz as they did. So in a way Facebook and iPhone are helping Google drive these two initiatives!

What’s in it for Google?

Given the business model of Google, it may not care too much about orkut having less number of users as compared to Facebook, or a particular phone company having smaller market share than iPhone. What these two intiatives can potentially achieve for Google is that it helps spread a standard platform to a huge number of websites and mobile phones - most importanly the platform that can serve Ads and can bring in more revenues to Google!

From Google’s point of view, they have done it at the right time. No wonder their stock price went up 2.2% today to close above $725 a share!