the Google-Facebook rivalry isn’t just going strong, it has evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet

The article points to non-indexable data as Facebook’s competitive advantage:

But anyone wanting to access that stuff must go through Facebook; the social network treats it all as proprietary data, largely shielding it from Google’s crawlers. Except for the mostly cursory information that users choose to make public, what happens on Facebook’s servers stays on Facebook’s servers. That represents a massive and fast-growing blind spot for Google, whose long-stated goal is to “organize the world’s information.”

And adding more data from partners will strengthen that advantage:

But you don’t build a competitor to Google with people alone. You need data. And Connect and Open Stream are intended to make Facebook a much more powerful force for collecting user information. Any time someone logs in to a site that uses Connect or Open Stream, they give Facebook the right to keep track of any activity that happens there—potentially contributing tons more personal data to Facebook’s servers. Facebook Connect and Open Stream are also designed to make each user’s friend network, which belongs to Facebook, even more valuable and crucial to the Web experience. Together, they aim to put Facebook users’ social networks at the center of all they do online.

via Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet.

Here’s something I wrote three and a half years ago about using data as an advantage against Google:

One thing’s for sure is that a walling off via preventing robots from crawling their sites would take a way much power from Google, and maybe it would shift power over to Yahoo since they are looking big into social search.  Social search could, in theory, return results from users linking to pages versus pages that were obtained from a crawl.

Link: Google vs. Old Media