• GigaOm, Tuesday, December 9, 2008 11 AM

Last week, Facebook and Google took the cover off their open registration systems, Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. It's really no surprise to find that this week, MySpace is countering with its own offering, MySpaceID. Om Malik says the system has two core components: Open Standards ("The Open Stack including OpenSocial, OAuth, and OpenID) and Google Friend Connect.

What this means is anybody's guess, including Malik's: "How all this works - I don't know, and frankly I don't care." Surely, MySpaceID is meant to do what Facebook Connect does; that is, "federate and aggregate Web services" through MySpace. However, Malik points out that "all this talk about IDs and Connects is just that -- lot of talk."

Noted blogger and Web technologist Dave Winer agrees. "We're seeing feature wars," he writes. "That's what's going on between Facebook and Google, both perfectly timing the rollouts of their developer proposition to coincide with the others' -- on the very same day! I don't even have to look at them and I am sure that they're too complicated." There's no doubt Google, Facebook and MySpace have put some of their best minds behind these efforts, but what's the benefit for users? People want to be able to carry their registrations with them to other sites, but they don't need complicated "walled garden" approaches to federation. Malik says Facebook will win this war "mostly because it has made things simpler."

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