There is a Web of projection that recently built up around the public debut of Facebook, Silicon Valley’s hottest Internet company. Although, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder denied this in an interview with CBS’s 60 minutes, but,that hasn’t stopped bloggers and investors from interpreting Facebook’s every move as preparation for an eventual public offering.

“Social media is going to be mainstream, it’s going to be ubiquitous,” said Mayfield Fund managing director Navin Chaddha at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms summit this week.

Venture capitalists say the excitement around Facebook is warranted given the explosive growth in membership. The social network has more than tripled the number of active members to 70 million from about 20 million in April 2007. They also said that they’ve asked start-ups they fund to shore up cash for the next year or so, until the public markets open their wallets for their debuts.

Despite the incredible traffic that Facebook continues to generate, the company is still in the process of determining just how to translate all the online traffic into actual dollars; 2007 revenue is reported to be $150 million. Although Facebook collected $300 million from Microsoft (MSFT) recently, they will need additional funding. An IPO is most likely the route they will take to acquire additional funding.

Source: Reuters

Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites. The new tool is going to compete with data portability crowd like Facebook Connect from Facebook or Data Availability from MySpace.

Google has been taking a more open and distributed approach with its OpenSocial API, which allows compliant applications to work across any social network. By extension, Friend Connect would provide glue to allow any site to add a social dimension and build connections to other social networks.

The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties), ” said TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington.

The key for all the data portability efforts (check out the DataPortability Project) is that users have granular controls to manage their data and to maintain privacy and security. Although, Facebook and MySpace have not fully disclosed how their privacy controls will work yet.

Source: TechCrunch