Lately, you’ve probably been wondering: “Man, what is Google’s fiendish master plan?” I’m here to explain.

First, let’s debrief. Just after Halloween, the search giant announced OpenSocial. That’s a development platform that will make it easier for coders to create cool little applications that can work on any social network that adopts the OpenSocial standard. Ever used iLike or SuperPoke! on Facebook? Those are the kind of applications I mean.

OpenSocial is important news for developers who have had to create applications for, say, Facebook, and then have had to recode the same application for one social network after another. That’s dull, repetitive work with often little reward. With OpenSocial, coders get a “code-once-use-many-times” solution.

The news about OpenSocial came just after word that Microsoft had won a bidding war against Google for a flake of Facebook (less than two per cent for $240 million) leaving Facebook valued at $15 billion. What does Microsoft get for its investment? It gets international ad sale opportunities on the Facebook platform (it already had U.S. rights).

So, clearly Google knew Microsoft was in the running and had a strategy to deal with the Microsoft/Facebook alliance. OpenSocial was just that.

Why? Because Facebook has the promise of being a powerful advertising platform, and an advertising platform that Google doesn’t get to benefit from, since Microsoft is selling the ad space.

Facebook is powerful because it can use members’ profile data to serve up extremely targeted ads – targeted ads that recently got much more targeted. Facebook can now collect data about user behaviours on non-Facebook sites controlled by Facebook partners, and report that data back to the mothership. And, inside Facebook, the social network’s new “Social Ads” turn Facebook users into little sandwich board carriers for major brands. Here’s how Facebook describes social ads to potential buyers:

“Instead of creating an advertisement and hoping that it reaches the right customers, you can create a Facebook Social Ad and target it precisely to the audience you choose. The ads can also be shown to users whose friends have recently engaged with your Facebook Page or engaged with your website through Facebook Beacon. Social Ads are more likely to influence users when they appear next to a story about a friend’s interaction with your business.”

In case that’s not clear, say I use the “Humungo Video” Facebook application to give Terms of Endearment four stars, or say I make myself a “fan” of Humungo Video on the product’s group page. Pretty soon my Facebook pals see an ad on their pages that says, “Wayne MacPhail gave Terms of Endearment four stars!” followed by a tiny linked ad for the film. The future’s not pretty. Potentially lucrative for Facebook, but not pretty and Facebook and its partners know this could turn into a giant turd in their mailboxes. They just can’t help themselves.

While users can opt out of the program and not have their Web activities reported as ads in friends’ mini-feeds, fans of brands can’t opt out and it seems Facebook still collects the data and crunches it in aggregate to serve up to ad partners. So far twelve major companies and brands, including The Coca-Cola Company, Saturn, Dove Cream Oils and the New York Times have signed on to the program. So, if you don’t want your Facebook pals to know you’ve been doing the crossword while driving, moisturizing your skin and pounding back sugared water, don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Meanwhile Google has OpenSocial. As well as applications that will run cross-social-media-platform, OpenSocial provides a means for ads associated with those applications to run cross platform. And, those ads will be controlled by the mighty ad sales engine that reaps Google its billions. Application developers will love this, first because it will allow them to potentially reap real benefit from their application development sweat. Second, because Facebook is now pitting small application developers against major brands in the application space on Facebook. What chance does Joe Coder and his fab “Rate My Movie” application have against Humungo Video’s “Rate My Humungo Video” application, when Humungo has posters up for it in all their stores?

Google’s public face is that it’s a search engine. It’s really an ad sales engine. And OpenSocial is one way it can stay that way.

So, that’s part one of the plan âe” Google wants to keep its online ad dominance.

Here’s part two. Cellphones. Cellphones are really mobile computers. Hold that thought.

Right now, Microsoft owns the desktop operating system space, despite inroads from Linux and Apple. And despite the fact that Vista got as warm a reception as the Dixie Chicks at a Dick Cheney pig roast. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for anyone to go head-to-head with Microsoft for the desktop space. Windows has about 90 percent of the world’s desktops with flavours of Linux and Apple battling it out for second place (Linux is coming on strong here).

However, when it comes to Windows on cellphones, it’s a different story. The Windows Mobile platform is not a clear winner and doesn’t get a lot of love from users (for the same reason many folks hate Windows in general). It’s only on about a quarter of existing smartphones. And, it’s going head-to-head with more nimble platforms like Symbian, Linux, Palm (long-toothed though it is), RIM and the iPhone OS. Industry analysts see Windows Mobile only getting a 29 percent share of the smartphone market by 2010. And that was before Google’s play.

Enter Android. Android, which was announced by Google just last week, is the mobile development platform that is the foundation of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), a multinational collective of about three dozen technology and mobile industry leaders. The idea is that cellphone manufacturers will be able to use the standard, open (and Linux-based) Android platform for free, to power their future cellphones (the first ones will be out in the second half of next year). And, as you might imagine, the new Google-provided mobile OS will have deep hooks into Google applications like search, maps, documents, RSS readers and, yes, ads. Ads that will know where you are and can serve geo-specific messages thanks to the GPS chips coming to almost all smartphones in the near future.

Though I worry a lot about the world of mobile, targeted ads, Android and the OHA is potentially good news for consumers (especially Canadian consumers) who have been locked into insane data plans on crippled handsets. Android has the potential of creating a mobile OS that gives users more control over the signals (Wifi, bluetooth, GPS), services and applications their phones can use, while, on the downside, potentially handing over a good deal of personal information about their habits and whereabouts. And, while targeted ads are frightening to some, the only alternative in the real world is non-targeted ads, which are just plain annoying. Or, you could do without a mobile computer altogether and live ad free.

So, let’s pull this altogether. OpenSocial was about Google maintaining ad dominance in the face of a threat by Facebook/Microsoft. Android and the Open Handset Alliance is about Google not only owning the mobile ad space, but becoming the Microsoft of the next two decades. It wants to own the mobile operating system space the way Microsoft owns the desktop now. It will let Facebook serve up targeted Humungo Video ads in its social network sandbox, while it delivers up geo-specific ads to millions of handsets and mobile computers globally. With a plan like that, you can rule the world.

Hope that clear things up.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...