In San Francisco, the site and app have signed up one in eight people between the ages of 21 and 40 (and these are real people; Sosh requires Facebook Connect). In certain circles — and not just the techies — you hear about Sosh all the time.

Now Sosh is trying its first remote launch, in New York City. So New Yorkers, if you’re looking for secret menu items and special shows and quirky events, you can try it, too.

By the way, Sosh doesn’t monetize yet, and you won’t find discount deals on the service — this is a venture-funded company that thinks it can build a marketplace for the interest graph — eventually.

Next up for Sosh: Chicago, Boston, L.A. and Seattle.

Hello, and happy Read In the Bathtub Day! (AllThingsD takes no responsibility for any damage to your electronics caused by reading this post in the bathtub.)

Here are our top 10 stories from the week of 2/4:

1.) Coming Soon to Yahoo: Ads From Google

2.) Twitter Got Hacked. Expect More Companies to Follow.

3.) Surface Pro: Hefty Tablet Is a Laptop Lightweight

4.) A Tasty Little Slice of Geek History: PBS’s “Silicon Valley” (Video)

5.) Samsung’s Super Bowl Ad Leaves Apple Alone

6.) In One Fell Swoop, Facebook Glitch Deep-Sixes the Web

7.) BlackBerry Z10 Off to a Strong Start in U.K.

8.) Why Twitter Is Buying Bluefin — And Why Bluefin Is Selling [Sidebar: Bluefin will also be presenting at D: Dive Into Media next week.]

9.) Salesforce Just Made Another Quiet Acquisition

10.) Nudged by Apple, Twitter’s Porn Saga Ends in a Raw Deal for Vine

For more of the week in review, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook’s high-profile CTO Bret Taylor is leaving the Silicon Valley social networking giant later this summer, with future plans to work on an as-yet-to-be-determined start-up.

The move is likely to be of concern to some over the newly public company’s ability to hold onto entrepreneurial talent, especially in the wake of continued intense media and investor scrutiny over its rocky IPO last month.

That’s especially true since Taylor has been in charge of both platform and mobile efforts at Facebook, a critical arena for it.

A pair of Facebook execs under Taylor — Mike Vernal and Cory Ondrejka — will be taking over platform and mobile, respectively.

Vernal joined Facebook in 2008 from Microsoft, leading the original Facebook Connect project and also working on platform efforts and the development of Open Graph. Ondrejka arrived at the company in 2010 through the acquisition of Walletin; he previously worked at Linden Labs on Second Life virtual worlds.

While well qualified, they have big shoes to fill. Named to CTO two years ago, Taylor has also been a strong public figure at Facebook events, including its recent developers conference. And he was front and center at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this week at the announcement of Facebook integration into its newest iOS.

In an interview today, Taylor said he understands that his departure will be perceived as a disruption, although he noted that Facebook had a deep bench of talented technical staff under CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

“I had always been upfront with Mark that I eventually wanted to do another start-up,” he said. “And we felt now is the best time after the IPO and the launch of some recent things for me to do that.”

That includes the Apple deal, Facebook Camera and also its App Center, which helps users find mobile and desktop apps their friends like.

Facebook is also reportedly working on a major effort to create its own smartphone, a project known as “Buffy.”

Taylor, who had previously worked at Google, has a strong start-up background. He left the search giant to found FriendFeed, a once-popular social aggregator. FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook in 2009.

Noting that his time at Facebook “has been the among the most fulfilling times of my career,” Taylor said that his departure was only part of life as usual in Silicon Valley.

“Cross-pollination among companies is what drives so much of innovation, so I would not project a lot onto this event,” he said. “I am really confident that the mobile and platform leaders at Facebook can deliver what needs to be done.”

When asked about the worries he had for the company, Taylor said the challenge of becoming public was top of mind internally.

“We are dealing with the cultural change of increasing attention, from going from a private company with a lot of scrutiny to a public company with a lot more scrutiny,” he said.

But he maintained that Facebook’s ability to remain nimble as it grew was strong, noting that the tech side continues to work in small teams. “These details really matter,” he said.

As for his own future, Taylor said he had not decided the area that he was going to focus on, but that he would be starting something with another former Googler, Kevin Gibbs.

Taylor said that he would probably focus on an industry he does not understand well as a consumer, as he did when he was working on Google’s mapping efforts.

“People said we had no sense of direction, so making maps better made sense,” he joked. “That turned out pretty well.”

Here is Taylor’s post on Facebook about the pending departure:

I wanted to let you all know that I’ll be leaving Facebook later this summer. I’m sad to be leaving, but I’m excited to be starting a company with my friend Kevin Gibbs.

While a transition like this is never easy, I’m extremely confident in the teams and leadership we have in place. I’m very proud of our recent accomplishments in our platform and mobile products, from Open Graph and App Center to Facebook Camera and our iOS integration. I’m even more excited for the world to see all the amazing things these teams have coming.

I’ve learned more than I ever imagined in my time at Facebook. I’m also extremely grateful for my relationship with all of the amazing people I’ve worked with here.

I want to give a special thanks to Mark Zuckerberg. You’ve not only been my boss for the past three years, but my mentor and one of my closest friends.

Thanks to all of you at Facebook for the most incredible three years of my life.

“Advertising is based on one thing: Happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing … It’s okay. You are okay.”

Don Draper, “Mad Men,” Season 1, “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”

I wonder what Don Draper would think today when the 23-year-old digital media buying whiz quips back, “Maybe, but let’s load it up into the system, along with 5,000 other versions of copy, and measure how many Facebook ‘Likes’ it drives within our target demo.”

I love the “Mad Men” version of the ad business. The storytelling. The simplicity. The glasses of scotch at 10 am. But these days in digital, it feels like the Math Men media buyers (with their terabytes of data) are taking over for the Mad Men creatives. It may not make for great TV drama, but they’ve got the performance data to prove that it’s their turn in the driver’s seat.

For years, digital ads were bought and sold by young media buyers from ad agencies and smooth salesmen from online publishers and networks, sealed over the modern version of the “three-martini lunch.” But with the steady advancement in online advertising technology over the last ten years, the geeks — I mean the Math Men — have gained the upper hand in determining how to spend these digital marketing dollars. Today, ad buying and selling is automated across nearly every digital channel, driven by complex algorithms crunching terabytes of data, all employed to meet rigorous ROI objectives — typically measured by new customer acquisition, profit margin, or revenues.

It all started in search, where Overture introduced (and Google perfected) a keyword ad marketplace for search pages. We take that marketer proposition for granted now, but it was heretical at the time — only pay us when a user clicks on your ad (versus every time we show your ad), and you decide how much to pay for that click (versus the same price for every advertiser). And sophisticated marketers took full advantage by leveraging technology platforms from Math Men companies like Efficient Frontier to maximize the efficiency of their search ad spend across millions of keywords, bids and text ad copy.

Since then, several major advances in advertising technology have further enabled the Math Men:

• Six years ago, Right Media introduced the first ad exchange for display ads, enabling the Math Men and their algorithms to buy and sell banner ads and skyscrapers across the Web. Google subsequently perfected the display exchange via their DoubleClick acquisition as well.
• Three years ago, Blue Kai introduced the first ad targeting-data marketplace, enabling the Math Men to leverage anonymous audience targeting data to further enhance marketers’ campaign performance.
• A year ago, Facebook launched its own ad platform API to enable Math Men and their algorithms to bid for Facebook ads based on user attributes. It seems likely that Facebook will eventually extend its monetization platform to third-party publishers, similar to what Google did with AdSense, as Facebook already has a strong distribution foothold via Facebook Connect.

It feels like we are witnessing the tipping point in digital media buying. Measured by dollars or by impressions, greater than 50 percent of online advertising is bought via APIs today (granted, most of this is still search). In a few years, I believe that 90 percent of all digital ad impressions, and more than 75 percent of digital ad dollars, will be bought and sold programmatically.

As we witnessed with search marketing, once a) marketers get a taste of the increased spend efficiency offered by these emerging platforms, and b) these platforms (and the associated marketer tools) become sufficiently easy to use, the dollars will flow, and quickly. The Math Men at Efficient Frontier are leveraging these display, data and social platforms to deliver superior ad spend performance for marketers across all digital channels today. It’s no longer just about search.

And the Mad Men are taking note. In the last few years, the ad agency holding companies have rolled out their own technology-driven digital ad “trading desks” to help their clients take advantage of these ad trading platforms. I wonder if they’ve replaced the scotch in the mini bars with the Math Men’s drink of choice, Red Bull.

Chris Moore is a partner with Redpoint Ventures and has been enabling the digital Math Men with investments in Efficient Frontier, Right Media, Blue Kai, Auditude, Inadco, Extole, Intent Media and eBureau. Follow him on Twitter @Redpointvc and @Moorski.

As the father of eight kids — now all between the ages of 12 and 21 — he knows a thing or two about the importance of finding the perfect place. (Note: Kaufer delicately calls family trips “adventures,” while getaways with his wife are “vacations.”)

Since then, TripAdvisor has become the online go-to destination for reviews of hotels from Barbados to bed-and-breakfasts in New York City.

In 2004, Kaufer sold the company to IAC for $210 million, setting off a somewhat complicated operating journey. A year later, TripAdvisor spun out of IAC as part of Expedia. It remained a division within the online travel agency until last month, when it broke off into an independent publicly held company.

Today, the Newton, Mass.-based company has 1,100 employees, attracts more than 50 million unique visitors and has published more than 60 million reviews. It trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “TRIP,” while Expedia continues to trade under the symbol “EXPE.”

Kaufer talked to AllThingsD about being an independently traded company, and about the media company’s prospects for growth:

AllThingsD: What is it like to be out from under Expedia’s wing?

Stephen Kaufer: There was a joke when we were spun out as part of Expedia from IAC. People asked me, “What’s your vision for TripAdvisor?” I would always say, “I want to be bigger than Expedia,” and people’s response always was, “That’s what the little brother might say.”

A year or two ago, we passed Expedia in comScore metrics, and are still experiencing growth. It’s a free service that’s valuable. It’s worldwide. TripAdvisor is in 21 languages, and three-fourths of the traffic comes from outside of the U.S.

Now that you are out from under Expedia, do you have more flexibility on where you send leads that are generated from people reading reviews on TripAdvisor?

Under Expedia, we had no obligation to send traffic to them … That never happened, and we were allowed to run independently. But at the end of the day, they [competitors] knew their marketing spend was going into Expedia’s pocket. That’s the most exciting thing. We are now completely independent. Expedia now owns no stock, so when I talk to Orbitz or Priceline, these folks can now partner with TripAdvisor without any hint of helping to fuel the competitors.

Why the spinoff now?

It was announced back in April, but basically there was a view that there was a class of investors that liked a pure Internet category leader and a fast-growing media company like TripAdvisor, and there’s another class that appreciates Expedia, which is in the dominant online travel agency position.

We were blurring the two when they were together. It gives Wall Street the opportunity to invest in either, and each company will find its own set of investors.

Do you think Wall Street is correctly valuing TripAdvisor? (The stock failed to come roaring out of the gate.)

No. But I’m not complaining. I think Wall Street, over the next couple of quarters, will appreciate how both companies perform as independent companies. The numbers have been a little hidden because they were jumbled together. … They’ve never seen TripAdvisor operate independently. They ask, “What will you do differently? How will things be the same?” Watch us, and I think you’ll like what you see.

Will you grow mostly organically, or through M&A?

We have a good track record on acquisition and product innovation.

The last few acquisitions, you saw a focus on our strategic priorities: A mobile company, a social company, two vacation rental companies and a company in China. Our four key investment areas that we called out are vacation rentals, mobile, social and geographic expansion.

In many ways, TripAdvisor was one of the original social networks, where users shared information on their vacations. Now you see Facebook getting into the space with Facebook Connect and other initiatives, too.

Everyone feels like being able to get travel recommendations from their friends is a natural evolution for getting a better recommendation, period.

There’s a couple of different angles. Some social travel companies are focused on making planning a group trip easier. No site out there has scale and does that well, and we don’t do that now. Facebook is a great platform to do it on, and it may be interesting to us in the future.

Our focus is leveraging the friend graph on Facebook and our rich content to give someone the experience of seeing recommendations or ratings from friends.

We love the concept, and we are furiously building up our own product offering to make it more valuable. If it’s not too early to call someone a leader, we are clearly it, because we have the content and the friend graph. We aren’t a site that’s based on Facebook, which is an advantage, because you can do anyting you want to do on the Web or the tablet or mobile.

What about Google moving into travel?

They have a couple of different approaches. They have Google Places, which reviews everything; and they have Google Hotels, which is a hotel finder; and then Google Flights, to help you find the best fare.

With Google Places, they still can’t seem to generate enough high-quality reviews to be useful. They compete with Yelp and us, and I’ve yet to be concerned. I was concerned about Google Flights — a lot — before they launched, but you cannot book through an online travel agent like Expedia — only directly through the airlines for now.

It’s an incomplete product, so I still use TripAdvisor flights, or go to Expedia or Orbitz. They get better results, and maybe aren’t as fast, but more information is still better.

They say they want to include online travel agents, but the airlines won’t let them. … Don’t mistake my tone for being sympathetic to Google on this one.

What about vacation rentals? HomeAway went public last year.

After HomeAway, there’s not that much.

We agree it’s a great market, and it deserves to be online. It helps consumers and there’s a need to bring a trust element into the equation. Folks who have tried it have liked (renting homes), and a whole lot of people haven’t tried it, because a hotel is all they’ve ever tried.

If they are reading hotel reviews, but I see that you are trying to stay seven nights in Orlando, I might say, “Did you know that you might be able to save money and get a private swimming pool?” They never would have thought of that as an opportunity, but there’s lots of great opportunities in Orlando and tons of other cities.

HomeAway dominates the category, but there’s plenty of room for a second, third and fourth.

I’m surprised that already three-fourths of your traffic comes from outside the U.S.

Yes, and that portion is growing. We have offices all over the globe, and our biggest investment opportunity is in China. We purchased a metasearch site for air, hotel and train in China. We view international growth as a tailwind to the business.

So what’s your price target for the stock? It’s currently trading around $25 a share.

I’m looking at how I can grow the business over the long term, and that’s why we are making some of these investments. I might be ahead of it, or other folks ahead of me, but I’m a nuts-and-bolts operator. I like to build stuff, and getting TripAdvisor to the next level of functionality and awareness is my priority — not the stock price.

The platform, which will launch sometime soon, is code-named “Project Z,” and will be hosted on Zynga’s own site. But in reality, the leading social games company won’t be gaining much distance or independence from the social network at all.

Project Z was one of 10 announcements made today, including five new mobile games and Facebook games, too. The event marks the first time Zynga hosted a major press conference, which is notable given that it is preparing for a $1 billion IPO.

There are not many details currently available about the Project Z platform, but from what I am hearing so far, it looks like Facebook’s influence will be noticeable everywhere.

For instance, Zynga will use Facebook Connect to enable game players to log in and play the games seamlessly between Facebook and Project Z. In other words, as players switch from platform to platform, they won’t lose their accomplishments or game play.

But Facebook also has agreements in place with Zynga to sell any advertising on a site hosted by Zynga, according to a previous story I wrote about disclosures made in Zynga’s IPO filing.

In that story, I wrote:

“If Zynga launched its own game center, or site, where visitors come to play games, Facebook may sell the ads for that network and share a portion of the proceeds with Zynga. The language in the contract is not clear on whether or not this is an exclusive arrangement.”

At the time, a Facebook spokesperson explained it was not currently selling ads on behalf of Zynga on Facebook, and was not sharing any advertising found on Facebook’s canvas.

“We did agree with Zynga to work together in the future on providing ads on their properties beyond Facebook, but we have no current timeline for when we might start working on that,” Facebook had said.

It is not known at this time whether Facebook will actually provide ads on Project Z, although it seems contractually possible.

There’s no word on how soon Project Z, also sometimes referred to as Zynga Direct, will launch, but Zynga is currently asking players to sign up for their gamer name online. The gamer names are called zTags.

One reason why players may want to go to Zynga instead of Facebook is because it will be a designated game network. Oftentimes on Facebook, people are reluctant to post game accomplishments into their feeds where all of their friends will see them. In Project Z, the game play could be more anonymous.

What does this all mean? Lots and lots more sharing, and probably a good amount of oversharing, that’s what.

It’s infinitely easier to consume something than to make an active decision to share it with other people. Facebook’s new real-time “ticker” stream of everything users read, watch and listen to (and also tag, friend and like) could turn every act of online consumption into something that’s now shared with friends.

Now Facebook users won’t necessarily have to endorse or recommend something by liking it, or exert themselves to come up with a witty comment. They can just keep reading, watching and listening as they always have.

Or they can head over to Facebook, see what their friends are doing at that moment, and join right in.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been positing since at least 2008 that every year Internet users share twice as much information as the year before.

He’s about to give this so-called “Zuckerberg’s Law” a big push.

It’s not hard to imagine Facebook sharing more than doubling after the f8 launches. Millions of tiny little actions are going to move from implicit to explicit. You can start to see why Facebook enabled its “ticker” news feed earlier this week (that’s the dizzying real-time stream that many users have been complaining about). There’s going to be a ton of information flying by.

Of course, many people no longer trust Facebook and its endless revisions and privacy incursions. It seems inevitable that people will feel exposed and exploited when everything they read, watch or listen to is shared.

So we’ll all be watching to see how Facebook and its partners control the privacy settings on this one. At the very least, there needs to be a very prominent and easy-to-use incognito mode.

But at the same time, what Facebook is doing isn’t new — it’s just turbocharging passive sharing with its social network. For instance, Last.fm, which “scrobbles” and shares users’ music listening item by item, was founded in 2002.

Later, in 2009, the Huffington Post built one of the most involved Facebook Connect implementations to date, in which participating users share every single article they read on the news site through Facebook. This functionality is basically what Facebook is going to be enabling and pushing to a mass of content sites now.

(In fact, Facebook had already built a version of this real-time automated sharing tool for “canvas” apps that run within Facebook, having launched a “games ticker” in August.)

Another thing to look for Thursday is how Facebook handles the contextualization of this flooding stream, since Web users consume mountains of content these days. Every once in a while I look at my own browser history and I’m shocked at how many pages I visited in the span of a few minutes.

According to sources, Facebook has built some interesting new interfaces around chronological views, consumption histories and item grouping.

We’ll make sure to look for that, and we’ll also be listening for whether Facebook addresses how advertisers and sponsored stories fit into the ticker.

On that note, team AllThingsD will be at f8 Thursday (tune in at 10 am PT here and/or to the Facebook live video stream) and will provide coverage and analysis throughout the day to overshare our content, too.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Related posts

• The Big Picture of Facebook f8: Prepare for the Oversharing Explosion
• Facebook’s f8 2011: This Is Your Life
• Big Media Hands Over Its Locks and Keys to Facebook
• What Facebook Has Announced So Far: The Timeline — And Verbs
• Get Ready, Facebook Apps Will Ask for Your Permission Only Once
• Facebook Gets in the App Discovery Game with “Graph Rank”
• Live: Facebook Answers Some Questions About its New Social Order

Unsubscribe normally focuses on helping people escape pesky mailing lists, but this new free Social Monitor tool aims to be a sort of anti-virus and spam software for the social Web.

Giving new Web services and apps your social login data makes them more useful and personal, and some new ones won’t even let you register unless you connect Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

But there’s no great way to keep track of all that sharing, and it is far too easy for a service to misuse access to highly personal information like the identity of your family and significant other, your birthday, your photos, even your friends’ religious and political views. Once you click yes on that little dialog permission box, you probably never think about it again.

I personally have given 128 services my Facebook login, 55 my Twitter login, 15 my Google login, and seven my LinkedIn login. (Check your own application permissions here: Facebook, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn.) Facebook says its users install 20 million third-party applications per day.

The Unsubscribe.com Social Monitor works in two ways: on its Web site, you can see a list of all the applications you’ve given social login data, along with their reputation scores and an analysis of how much data you’re giving them. Should that information worry you, you can click to disconnect access to an app directly from the dashboard.

Plus, once you have the plug-in installed, any time a service asks you to connect your account to Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, Unsubscribe.com will pop up its own analysis and recommendation of whether or not the service is trustworthy.

Santa Monica, Calif.-based Unsubscribe has raised $2.1 million from investors including Charles River Ventures, First Round Capital, SV Angel and DFJ Frontier.

But is that all there is?

With only a smattering of deliberate exceptions, new sites and apps launch with Facebook Connect to get the network effects of tying into its powerful social graph and potent spamming tools. Instead of attempting to create their own social network, they piggyback on top of Facebook’s.

In fact, one former Google product manager told AllThingsD recently that one of the biggest reasons he left the company to work on a social start-up was so he could use Facebook Connect, something Google discourages.

But while Facebook might be the hottest game in town, it’s still a pretty warped and inaccurate picture of what it means to have friends.

And it all makes me wonder, what are other models of “social” besides Facebook’s current product? Could someone who does social better than Facebook mount a significant competitor to the site? And, most importantly, could they succeed?

Friending Is Broken

One of Facebook’s most fundamental flaws is its notion of friending. Relationships on Facebook don’t naturally expire as they do in the real world. To unfriend is drastic, used only in the direst of circumstances–like a bad breakup.

And the fact that people from so many parts of our lives are on Facebook elicits bland communication. You often don’t really know who you’re talking to, so you stop talking.

Akshay Kothari, CEO of the news app Pulse, only recently started a new Facebook profile. He friended just 15 people: His family, closest friends, and Pulse co-workers. It turned out great, he said–his newsfeed was full of relevant and important information.

But after about two months, Kothari started logging back into the old profile. “It was like a telephone book that I had lost,” he said. Plus, he’d missed out on parties, because he hadn’t seen the event invitations.

You might think that some of these complaints have to do with life in the hyper-connected tech industry–where talking to someone for five minutes at a conference often results in a friend request–and they often do.

But meanwhile, a family member of mine joined Facebook this past year when she started high school. She already has 500 friends. Just imagine how many she’ll have in five years.

Friend overload was part of Facebook’s rationale behind Facebook Groups, 50 million of which have been created in the past six months. Start-ups such as GroupMe and Fridge are focused on groups as well.

But while explicitly designated groups might make great sense for co-workers, or a family, or even a neighborhood, not every relationship fits neatly into a group.

Proximity

One alternative to Facebook’s static friending is dynamically created relationships based on common experiences. The start-up Color, despite its many flaws, is certainly onto something here.

The idea behind Color is to create a collaborative record of a place and time where people were together. The company’s app aggregates users’ photos by location, using factors like GPS as well as sound and light detection.

As compared to Facebook, proximity-based approaches from companies like Color could potentially do a better job of integrating the offline world, and be better at helping us find and meet people we do not already know.

Color, with its big funding and smart team, should have had better intuition about helping people understand and find value from its app.

Even so, it might not have been able to solve the extremely hard problems it is posing.

For instance, how do you get new users to see the value of a social product without connecting to people they already know? How do you do social without the notions of friending or privacy?

Interestingly, Color CEO Bill Nguyen has said Color may add Facebook Connect, as well as tell new users who are not within a reasonable distance of other people to come back later.

Other companies are working around this approach too. The college flirting service LikeALittle, aka LAL, recently released an iPhone app that creates an on-the-fly chat room for any location. Users can see who else is currently present and scroll through a historical stream of photos and statuses posted from that place.

If you’ve checked out Yobongo, the pleasantly designed but often empty iPhone chat room app, the LAL app feels kind of like a hybrid of Color and Yobongo. But there’s a difference: LAL already has millions of users at 450 colleges, so it doesn’t have quite the loneliness problem of the other two apps.

LAL, which is public and anonymous by default, says it’s only for colleges, but when I logged into the app recently I could see active streams for Bay to Breakers, LAL headquarters, and Las Vegas.

Beyond Real Names

But Facebook is not just about friending. The service has become the identity provider for much of the Web–a powerful asset that’s increasingly hard for competitors to challenge.

This real name system has been a core tenet of Facebook since it started, and in many online situations entering a Facebook-approved real name is tantamount to swiping a card that verifies you’re a real person.

But a name, password and profile picture are a two-dimensional version of a person. You could better ensure that someone is who they say they are by adding fingerprint scans, VPN dongles and, perhaps someday, X-ray vision.

Or you could try users’ mobile phones, which are always with them. You could use something like a Google Voice account that rings all their numbers: Home, work and cell. You could incorporate their presence from instant messaging to better indicate availability.

If you think about it, there has to be some sort of virtual unified identity system that’s better than just a real name.

Incidentally, this could be an awfully good way for Google to compete with Facebook.

The Interest Graph

Another meaningful alternate to Facebook’s social graph is the so-called “interest graph,” as best demonstrated by Twitter.

On Twitter and other sites like Quora, people you’re interested in are commingled with topics you’re interested in. Once you follow a critical mass of Twitter accounts, you get a non-stop flow of personalized content.

A weather update combined with a friend’s post about winning a soccer game combined with a breaking news alert plus three heaping servings of self-promotional tweets does get a bit chaotic sometimes, but it’s all stuff you’ve explicitly said you want to hear about.

Twitter may not be a full competitor to Facebook, but it obviously fills a simple and accessible publishing function better than Facebook. And because Twitter is almost completely public, and because it’s designed around one-way relationships, the notion of un-following is less dramatic than un-friending.

But that begs the question: Are public, one-way relationships really all that social?

Distributed Networks

Another approach might be to go the other direction, one toward more privacy. Facebook’s Achilles’ heel is privacy, so one way to defeat the company might be to conceive of a social network that gives more power to users.

Altly is a newly launched company that promises it is building an alternative to Facebook that will be more respectful of users’ information.

Altly CEO Dmitry Shapiro, who was most recently a Myspace executive, wrote a manifesto about his company’s premise:

For every Coke there is a Pepsi, for every Ford there is a Chevy, for every PC there is a Mac and for every Facebook there is…. a void!

Shapiro isn’t the first person with this idea. Last year, Diaspora, which has yet to deliver on its promise of a distributed open source social network, attracted more than 6,000 donations before it even got started. The founders recently promised “we’re still here, and we’re going strong,” although their network is still invite-only.

Another fresh new company called SecretSocial (which operates out of the cute URL https://shh.sh/) allows users to create chat rooms that expire, leaving no data behind, after a user-designated time period of 15 minutes to one week. Organizers can invite participants via SMS, Twitter or phone and then converse without logging in.

Or there’s Path, which uses a one-way relationship model that’s the opposite of Twitter: Users choose whom to share with, instead of whom to follow. Path limits users to sharing their pictures and video with 50 people to encourage them to pick carefully.

A more private social Web site will grow more slowly as it loses the benefit of network effects that Facebook and others so effectively enjoy. Users are probably more likely to choose a site because their friends use it than because it promises to keep them safe.

It’s clear that existing social networks value publicness, for advertising purposes and others. Attempts to regulate privacy could significantly change the social networking dynamic.

Facebook and other companies including Google, Twitter and Zynga are this week aggressively fighting a proposed California law that would make social networks more private by requiring their users to choose privacy settings up front and defaulting all options to private.

Mobile

When you ask tech start-up folks who or what could best compete with Facebook, as I have repeatedly, the most common answer you get is “mobile.”

Said one social start-up CEO:

“The way people use web is very different than the way people view and interact on mobile devices. One company can’t focus on and win on both platforms at the same time since they are so different. There is definitely a chance for companies to compete with Facebook by focusing on mobile.”

The reasoning goes like this: Using a phone is an intimate and personal experience in ways that a Web browser isn’t. It’s also much more connected to the offline real world. Your phone is always with you and knows where you are, and you’re probably the only one who uses it. It has your text and calling contacts.

Plus, competing with a company that has a seven-year, 700 million-member advantage requires ingenuity. Facebook became a viable competitor to Google not by improving search (in fact, Facebook search is awful), but by changing the Web paradigm to include social.

That said, it seems like a cop out to say the best way to compete with Facebook’s version of social is not social, but mobile. But perhaps it’s true.

(Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.)

Phone book photo credit: Flickr user bondidwhat

Co-founders Nick Baum and Bill Ferrell were until late last year product managers at Google. At 28 and 27, respectively, and with five and four years at Google, respectively, they had each spent most of their careers at the search giant.

Baum was a product manager on Chrome, Android and Reader, and an engineer for AdWords and YouTube. Ferrell was a product manager on search ads and infrastructure.

Both of them had participated in Google’s “associate product manager” program, which trains young technical hires to be internal leaders. But they actually didn’t know each other from Google; they met late last year at a Y Combinator “Start-up School” event at Stanford, and ended up applying to the accelerator program together.

Having completed Y Combinator in March, Baum and Ferrell are now funded by the $150,000 Yuri Milner’s Start Fund offered to all recent YC companies.

Until Tuesday, San Francisco-based WhereBerry was being tested among a small group of a couple hundred people; now, it is open to the public. The main thing that people do on the service is post ideas for places to eat, events to attend, and venues to visit. Users receive emails whenever one of their friends posts a new proposal.

“Neither of us left because we didn’t like it at Google,” Baum said. However, he added, working outside of Google seemed like the right thing to do when starting a social Web service.

“We explored doing it internally within Google,” Baum said. “But at the end of the day that made sense for products that used Google’s infrastructure in a really powerful way, like something that crawls the web, or needs machines, or needs to hire really quickly.”

As for a social planning service? “It’s amazing that these days two people with laptops can create something that millions of people use,” Baum said. And WhereBerry was a way for Baum to return to coding, something he’d missed in his product managing days.

Plus, Baum added, “The biggest thing we got by not doing this with Google is access to Facebook Connect–which is pretty hard to do within Google.”

Connecting to Facebook won’t necessarily be WhereBerry’s ticket to success, but it does help the service be “social from the ground up,” as Facebook likes to describe it. WhereBerry bears more than a passing resemblance to a long line of online get-together planning services that haven’t really gotten off the ground, such as Renkoo, Skobee, Socializr, LivingSocial before it did deals, Pinchd, Plancast and Ditto. It’s too early to say whether WhereBerry can be sufficiently better or luckier.

Meanwhile, back to the ongoing ex-Googler start-up phenomenon, it wasn’t hard for Baum to think up a quick list of some other start-ups from people who’ve recently left Google: Beluga, Optimizely, Inporia, ReadyForZero, Firespotter Labs, Campfire Labs, TapJoy and AdKu. I’m sure readers can think of plenty more.

Baum described Google’s “bottom-up culture” and the associate product manager leadership program specifically as forms of preparation for being an entrepreneur, saying he disagrees with the perception “that Google has lost its appeal.”

Baum referred to Marissa Mayer’s comments, as reported by Steven Levy in the new book “In the Plex” about Google anticipating that its young APMs would one day leave. Levy wrote in his account of traveling around the world with a class of APMs in 2007,

I was stunned when a poll of my fellow travelers revealed that not a single one of them saw him- or herself working for Google in five years. Marissa Mayer took this news calmly, claiming that such ambition was why they had been hired in the first place. “This is the gene that Larry and Sergey look for,” she told me. “Even if they leave, it’s still good for us. They’re going to take the Google DNA with them.”

Baum, it turns out, was one of the APMs on that trip.

I use Facebook Connect to integrate with these services when I use them for the first time because it’s easier to click one button than retyping all that personal information, and because these services are better if I’m not trying them all alone or with only strangers. Plus, when I connect I can share content back with my non-early adopting friends on larger services.

But I use way fewer than 106 apps on a daily basis. Facebook’s stats show me that I’ve exchanged data with only a little more than half of them in the last six months.

Meanwhile, I have connected 47 applications to my Twitter account, 15 applications to my Google account, and six applications to my LinkedIn account.

I’m sure other busy bee app lovers pollinate far more widely than I have. You can go see your own stats by visiting these pages: Facebook, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn.

It would be sacrilege to launch a social Web service today without connecting to one or more of these services. To not use Facebook Connect or an equivalent abandons immense potential for a service to grow naturally using network effects.

Multiple social apps have tried to strike out on their own and not be dependent on larger networks, but they seem to give up after a few months of being out in the wilderness.

Path, for instance, launched its more intimate photo-sharing service without the ability to post photos to Facebook; that was quickly rectified.

New heavily funded photo-sharing app Color, in its attempt to shake up the world of social networks, only asked users to register with a first name and no other tie to their preexisting online identity.

But that radical departure meant that many people logged onto the proximity-based service and found nobody to share pictures with in their vicinity. And there’s nothing more lonely and confusing than using a social service with nobody else on it.

Even Color is coming around, CEO Bill Nguyen told me. The company plans to add Facebook Connect in a coming version of its apps. “We’re not going to give up but we’ll start making Color more familiar,” he said.

What’s perhaps most crazy about all this to me is that Facebook Connect has only been around less than three years. After beta testing throughout 2008, the service launched to all Web sites in December of that year.

Now, it is just the way things are done.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

A really addictive experience.

Or at least that’s the hope of YooMee Games, which is unveiling a new gaming platform today (yes, another one!) that allows developers to add features to their games, like tournament play and one-on-one challenges.

The San Francisco-based company’s founder, Prita Uppal, jokes it is the Chuck E. Cheese of the Internet because of the tickets.

It starts with players placing wagers or buying tokens for a chance to win money and tickets that can be turned in for prizes. “It’s an arcade. You buy coins and then compete with others in tournaments and get tickets based on the outcome, which can be turned into cash or prizes, based on how many tickets you have.”

Think skee ball, but with better prizes than Tootsie Rolls.

At the start, YooMee will have more than 30 games to choose from, including popular puzzle games, like Bubble Town and Cube Crasher, and word games like WordStone. Prizes include Amazon gift cards, digital cameras and other gadgets.

Uppal said the company is not a casino and people are not gambling on the site, because the games are skill-based and not based on chance. “It’s completely skill-based competition. It’s legal. All the casual games you see and play on the Web are skill games–so you can wager and compete and earn money.”

Still, the business model is complex, having to optimize winnings for the player while also distributing money back to the developer and keeping some for itself.

Users don’t have to pay to play–instead they can play for free and view ads, such as a video pre-roll. That business is doing well, and allowed the 22-employee company to reach profitability in October.

Uppal says YouMee isn’t competing against other companies that are providing developers other services, such as leaderboards, comments or rankings. Rather, it can be used in addition to those services. It also uses Facebook Connect, so friends can easily find one another from their regular social network.

Commonly, a player will be introduced to the “arcade concept,” which Uppal is also “calling social competition,” after playing one of the games. A message will appear that says something like, “If you had paid 50 cents, you would have made $10 with this score. Do you want to enter this competition?”

In founding the company, Uppal placed a few good bets of her own.

She met her first VCs on the ski-lift chair in Park City, Utah. Directly from the ski slopes, U.S. Venture Partners flew her to Silicon Valley–she was without a computer and practically still wearing her ski boots–to give a 45-minute presentation. She had a term sheet two days later.

And she found her second VC after seeing a psychic, who predicted that the letter “A” and foreign money were going to be really important. That led her to take meetings with Altos Ventures, which has roots in Asia. “I wouldn’t have ever spoken to them if it weren’t for the psychic.”

The service seems remarkably similar to 4chan, the rowdy image-sharing message board, but rather than anonymity, Canvas requires that users have accounts (would-be users currently sign up through Facebook Connect), and unlike 4chan, Canvas keeps an archive of posted graphics (and will reportedly later support other media).

Poole has described his goal with Canvas as trying “to reimagine what an image board should be today using the current technologies available.” Canvas and 4chan are run separately.

Unlike the many personal and professional image-sharing sites that already exist, Canvas seems oriented toward PhotoShop jobs, cartoons and memes (more like Cheezburger, which often riffs off 4chan-originated concepts, and just raised $30 million for an Internet comedy empire). Canvas is backed by Ron Conway, Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Kenneth Lerer and Joshua Schachter.

Image via TechCrunch.

Now, users will be able to share articles, leave comments and play fantasy sports on Yahoo by signing in to accounts they’ve created on Facebook and Google. They won’t have to create a Yahoo profile or associate their Facebook or Google ID with an existing Yahoo one (though a Yahoo account is being created in the background that’s associated with the other site’s credentials).

Other properties included in the new login regime (or lack of a regime) are Yahoo! Finance, as well as pages for users to rate movies, music and restaurants. (Obviously for some properties, like Yahoo! Mail, users will still need to plug in Yahoo-specific credentials to create a full-fledged Yahoo ID.)

The beleaguered company is playing this as a move toward openness. And there is some precedent for the move. Yahoo had previously allowed users to log in to Flickr using OpenID logins from Google, and had partnered with Facebook to give users an option, through Facebook Connect, to integrate their accounts on the two sites and send information back and forth between them.

But this latest announcement is different from Facebook Connect; what Yahoo is now offering is a wholesale substitution of another site’s account system. Yahoo for a long time had the coveted advantage as a Web portal of having a large percentage of its visitors logged in at all times to a consistent account across all its properties; that doesn’t seem to be a top priority for the company anymore.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company is working hard to win over heavyweight content distributors, hoping to convince them to link their sites up with Facebook, or to make their existing links deeper. The pitch: Connect your site to ours, and we’ll drive you eyeballs and help you hang on to them. And in return, we’d like to know more about your users.

Facebook has been headed in this direction for a while, and made a big move in April when it rolled out its “Like” button to outside sites. Some two million of them have now integrated the social network in some form.

But Facebook has made a point of wooing big media companies in the past few months. It has hired New York-based ambassadors specifically for the task, and is sending top executives out east for schmoozes. It might be working.

For instance: Facebook and Time Warner are now talking about using the social network’s login system to “authenticate” cable subscribers who want to watch online video from cable channels like TBS and HBO. Sources familiar with the companies’ plans say they are in early stages, but that the two companies are hoping to link up first with Verizon’s FiOS TV  service.

The upside for Time Warner and Verizon: It will be easy for customers to sign into Web video sites, and easy for them to tell their Facebook friends what they’re doing. That can drive more traffic and engagement, and ultimately more ad dollars or more subscribers.

And the upside for Facebook: It gets incredibly valuable data.

If that linkup goes through, it will be a big deal for pay TV operators, who have been wary about letting outsiders act as gatekeepers between their subscribers and their content. That’s why Facebook and Time Warner want to work with Verizon, a newcomer to the TV business, instead of established cable giants like Comcast.

The proposed Time Warner-Facebook linkup is a good example of what Facebook is trying to accomplish across the board. It wants to insert itself between media companies and their consumers–with “Share” buttons, “Like” buttons and Facebook Connect logins–but in a way that makes both groups happy about the arrangement.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Dan Rose, the company’s VP of partnerships, made a version of that pitch to senior Time Warner executives in a meeting last week. The pair also hosted a presentation and dinner for about 20 other big Web publishers, including executives from ESPN, the New York Times, Condé Nast, CBS and at least one media celebrity. “Tina Brown was actually there, which I thought was sort of hilarious,” says one attendee.

Facebook has also hired two New York-based executives tasked specifically with getting big media companies on board: Andy Mitchell, previously a VP of business development at the Daily Beast, and Nick Grudin, who held the same title at Newsweek.

Executives who’ve attended the meetings say media companies seem reasonably receptive to Facebook’s approach. In part, it seems, it’s because the company isn’t Apple or Google, two heavyweights that can make Web publishers wary.

“Facebook doesn’t attest to be perfect about being perfectly transparent about where they’re going. But they’re pretty predictable,” says one meeting participant. “It’s not like Apple, where they’re closed.”

Add another: “It was very friendly. It wasn’t like meetings we’ve had with Google, where everyone’s arms are crossed.”

But publishers are also realistic–they realize by trading user data for traffic and engagement, they’re helping to build up a company that is already competing with them for ad dollars. “In the end, they’re like the other big guys,” says another attendee. “They’re both friend and foe simultaneously.”

Presenting at the webinar will be Myspace CEO Mike Jones–-who has been pitching Myspace as “a social entertainment destination” rather than a social network–-and Dan Rose, VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing for Facebook.

Here are my live notes:

Mike Jones says the launch today is called “Mashup with Facebook.” Users can share a stream of entertainment content with one-click setup.

One million users engaged so far with Myspace Facebook through initial partnership of “Sync with Facebook,” which was launched in August to push user streams on Myspace to Facebook. Adding Facebook Like button soon.

Image to the right is Myspace’s special branding of its integration with Facebook Connect: “Mashup.”

Dan Rose: Every day 10,000 Web sites integrate with Facebook Connect, but this one is special. Adding users into the experience works when it’s naturally social in the offline world, and entertainment is social.

Rose says Facebook users will be able to take their Likes to Facebook as well.

Jones says this feature will be rolling out to the full Myspace audience today.

Rose says, “There’s nothing different about this implementation than any other Facebook Connect implementation or any other implementation of the Facebook Like button across the Web.”

Jones says, “We think this is a complementary offering to Facebook and other social platforms.”

Rose says it’s good that Myspace is focused on entertainment and Facebook is focused on being a social platform, and those things are different.

In the last couple of days (since the Facebook Connect option was rolled out on the Myspace signup page), metrics for people connecting with Facebook look good, says Jones, but he doesn’t specify. (He keeps saying things are good questions, and then not really answering them.)

There is no financial component to the relationship.

And that’s it! Pretty mellow.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Facebook VP Dan Rose

Presenting at the webinar will be Myspace CEO Mike Jones–who has been pitching Myspace as “a social entertainment destination” rather than a social network–and Dan Rose, VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing for Facebook.

Myspace adding Facebook Connect has been rumored for so long you’d think it had already happened, so hopefully there will be more to the deal than that.

If things go as heralded, this will be the first Facebook announcement in a long time where CEO Mark Zuckerberg has not spoken for the company. Dan Rose is a former Amazon guy who joined Facebook in 2006. He has recently spoken on Facebook’s behalf about a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing to give it social data to improve search, and EA’s five-year exclusive Facebook Credits deal. Rose was previously Facebook’s VP of business development and monetization, and according to Kara Swisher was the main negotiator in Facebook’s failed effort to buy Twitter a couple of years ago.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Google publicly shamed Facebook this week for not giving its users the option to export the email contacts of their Facebook friends and import them to Gmail. The rapid-fire kerfuffle between the two companies came after private talks about sharing such data had broken down, and is apparently working, with tech industry opinion seeming to side with Google, even though few if any users seem to actually care about the issue. Sooner or later, if users start demanding to own their email lists and complaining about Facebook being evil, it will happen.

But the actual battle isn’t about reciprocity. If it’s on purely moral grounds, everyone’s hypocritical here. Facebook has arrangements to share user email addresses with Microsoft and Yahoo, and Google has in the past impeded Orkut users from exporting emails to Facebook. The reason this is playing out this way is because of the contentious relationship between Facebook and Google, and Google’s planned competitor to Facebook, a.k.a. Google Me.

As a larger question, what captivates me is how much value people are putting on user email addresses. Are our email addresses really the best proxy for who we are?

If you peel back the back-and-forth, the substance of Facebook’s argument is that Facebook users are on the service because it’s a social network, not an email application. When you use Facebook, your friends are identified by their (usually real) names, and you hardly ever see their email addresses. From Facebook platform tech lead Mike Vernal’s comment on TechCrunch:

Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

But to Google’s point, if people want to deactivate their Facebook accounts and/or try another service, they shouldn’t lose what they’ve created. When you join a new service, the best way it becomes useful and interesting is to quickly find and invite your existing friends (see: network effects)–and the best way to do that is to import a list of your email contacts.

The problem is you don’t own your friends’ email addresses; they do. Email is the only successful example of a decentralized social network.

Facebook has a privacy setting that lets you decide who specifically can view your email address. But that’s just within the centralized system of Facebook; you don’t (yet) get to choose where your email address can be shared. Plus, as we all know, Facebook’s privacy settings can get rather complicated, and both we users and the company change them over time.

Say I have a business contact I don’t want to share my personal email with, and she goes and exports her Facebook email contacts so she can fill out her Yahoo Mail contact list. Those settings need to carry over. And even if they do, spam and invasions of privacy are pretty much inevitable.

But am I my email address? As someone who’s very recently changed jobs, I know firsthand that link can be broken. I registered for so many of the sites I use with my old work email, and my whole address book was locked up there too. Now I have to reconstruct those relationships with a new identity. But I can do it. I’m still myself, after all.

Probably all of you reading this have more than one email address, and often multiple people use the same email address or the same computer. There’s not a one-to-one link between self and email, and the overlaps are often confusing and annoying.

Besides email, other options for an identity token might be your phone number, your social security number, your Facebook user name or your fingerprint.

But email seems to be the agreed-upon best proxy for Web services. Companies like RapLeaf run their businesses on connecting and aggregating information about people based on identifying their valid email addresses (and incur concerns about the implications of getting all that data in one place and selling it).

The stakes in this battle are increasingly high. Both Facebook and Google want to be our identity on the Web. I stay logged in to Gmail and Facebook all day from my laptop, and reap the benefits of those services being integrated with other ones, whether it’s a related service like Google Calendar or a new doodad that I can use Facebook Connect to register for.

Both Facebook and Google are striving to do two things:

• Represent us best by collecting our connections and experiences
• Be our token to bring that identity the rest of the Web

So think about where this is going. Facebook last week introduced a single-sign-on feature for phones (first on select Android apps and soon iOS). The way this will work is when you open a participating app, you have the option to connect to Facebook and bring your identity and friends with you. So the first time you use the app, it knows you and your context. You can imagine if this were to extend to Facebook’s Instant Personalization product, and you were to get a phone that out-of-the-box got your Facebook account and then automatically set up your contacts, preferences, apps and anything else you want or need. It’s powerful stuff.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Background: Last week, Google stopped allowing Facebook to help its users find their friends by importing their Gmail contacts list. Google said the move was about data portability and liberation, calling Facebook a “data dead end” because it wasn’t giving its users’ email addresses to Google.

Facebook yesterday found a workaround to re-enable Google contacts importing, and Facebook engineering lead Mike Vernal commented on TechCrunch at length under his own name, charging Google with hypocrisy for disallowing contact importing for Orkut last year and “limiting user choice.”

What’s funny, though, as sources have pointed out to us, is that Facebook actually does allow email importing, specifically to Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail (we checked AOL mail too, but couldn’t find it there).

This is no secret; Yahoo launched its Facebook email contact importer in March of this year. In a blog post at the time, senior product manager Rick Pal said,

Importing from Facebook is super simple…After you click login, we will authorize your account and begin importing, which may take a minute or two depending on your Internet speed and how many Facebook friends you have.

Update: Microsoft confirmed through a spokesperson that its Windows Live users can import both Facebook and Gmail contacts, and said some nice stuff about its commitment to customer choice.

Access to user emails isn’t something Facebook gives just anyone. In fact, only a few partners can hook into them while the rest have to rely on users’ Facebook-formatted information available through Facebook Connect. That includes Google. The difference, according to a source, is that Yahoo and Microsoft asked nicely.

Please see my disclosure related to Facebook here.

While it seems to be a stealth launch, the new online political site for MSNBC.com, created by Hollywood production firm BermanBraun, is now up and running.

Called BLTWY–as in “Beltway,” presumably for the road that rings the nation’s capital–the striking rich-media content site is now live. (You can see it above.)

BLTWY seems to follow along the sweeping horizontal wall and extensive use of larger photos and videos that characterize BermanBraun’s popular Wonderwall celebrity site.

In May, BermanBraun and MSNBC announced the collaboration in a blog post, noting:

“Politicians have now become part of popular culture, and de-facto celebrities, attracting considerable media attention. BermanBraun and the Msnbc Digital Network announced a partnership to create an original destination site which will go beyond policy and polls to explore the celebrity side of politics…It will take you inside the beltway to explore the lives of politicians as celebrities, giving politics the Wonderwall treatment.”

BLTWY is definitely aimed at meshing celebrity and politics and has a lot of interactive elements, such as polls and Facebook Connect.

In fact, the main feature at the moment is a diva depiction of the Supreme Court.

The slick site also appears to be developed in HTML5, rather than using Adobe (ADBE) Flash technology and fits to the entire screen with the homepage remaining in a persistent manner.

BermanBraun has already created several sites for Microsoft (MSFT) and its online properties. Wonderwall debuted in 2009 on its MSN portal, where its women-focused Glo also resides.

You didn’t think Facebook would integrate with Google (GOOG) Voice, did you?

Actually, according to sources close to the situation, Facebook and Skype are poised to announce a significant and wide-ranging partnership that will include integration of SMS, voice chat and Facebook Connect.

The move by the pair–which have tested small contact importer integrations before–is a natural one for the social networking giant, which is aiming to be the central communications and messaging platform for its users, across a range of media.

Facebook’s goal, according to sources: To mesh communications and community more tightly together and add more tools to allow users to do so.

Since it was not going to create an Internet telephony service of its own–kind of like not creating a mobile operating system–Facebook has apparently turned to the Web’s Internet telephony leader.

Interestingly, Facebook has previously tested a video chat product.

Skype had 124 million people using it at least once a month and 560 million registered users, which will be bolstered by the 500 million Facebook users who will now be able to use it more seamlessly within Skype.

That will include allowing users to SMS and call Facebook friends from Skype, which will now deploy Facebook Connect.

And also do video chat using Facebook in Skype, which you can see below, in a very odd screenshot sent to me by a source–Walt Mossberg’s code name is not Daniel Matthews and I am not Allison Brown. (Click on the image to make it larger.)

This all will be available in Skype’s newest version, 5.0, which emerges from beta in a few weeks.

This is a big win for the Luxembourg-based Skype, which is currently readying a public offering.

While it now dominates the online calling space, it needs to be present where users are now moving, such as Facebook.

And for Facebook, this is also helpful to its international push, making it more appealing globally since Skype is much more popular outside the U.S.

It will be interesting to see if both cross-integrate into their popular mobile apps too.

Facebook has been doing a lot of integrations with other communications services, such as a massive upcoming one with Yahoo (YHOO) and also one with Microsoft (MSFT).

Skype is also increasing its partnerships. Today, for example, it will announce a deal with Avaya, which makes office phones and related software aimed at businesses.

The pair called it a “strategic unified communications and collaboration partnership,” and is centered on business and personal videoconferencing.

It’s not as mysterious as it seems, this mini-controversy about finding friends on Facebook for Apple’s new social music network.

According to sources familiar with Facebook’s platform, the social networking giant essentially denied Apple’s Ping access to application programming interfaces that would allow it to search for an iTunes user’s friends on Facebook who also had signed up for Ping.

Normally, this API access is open and does not require permission.

That is, unless some entity wants to access it a lot. In that case, Facebook claims it requires an agreement for reasons primarily centered on protection of Facebook user data and, of course, infrastructure impact.

With 160 million iTunes users, say sources with knowledge of the Facebook platform, that could potentially mean a lot of impact.

Others disagree, noting the load would be insignificant and it is just used by Facebook to gain leverage from those wanting to access its powerful platform.

That was one of the bones of contention in the talks that sources said Apple (AAPL) and Facebook conducted. The negotiations about an agreement went awry and the pair could not come to terms.

In fact, at the launch event in San Francisco yesterday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs complained to me about what he called “onerous terms” that Facebook had demanded for the friends connection and suggested using search or email to add friends to Ping.

But, at the same event another exec, Worldwide Product Marketing SVP Phil Schiller, said to me in a video interview that one could use Facebook to find friends on Ping.

In fact, Apple still included the ability to find Facebook friends in its demo onstage and also after it made iTunes 10 available for download.

It also currently claims this on its Ping page: “Find even more music fans with a quick search, by sending email invites, or by connecting to your Facebook account.”

But you can’t actually do that on Ping right now.

Sources said Apple went ahead with a plan to access the Facebook APIs freely, but Facebook blocked it since it violated its terms of service.

When that happened, it seems Apple pulled the plug on the connection with Facebook friends.

But maybe not for long. Sources also said the companies were still in discussions about putting the more robust Facebook Connect feature in Ping.

Because, in the end, it is all about connection.

BoomTown has requests into both Facebook and Apple for a comment.

Earlier today, Facebook said:

“Facebook believes in connecting people with their interests and we’ve partnered with innovative developers around the world who share this vision. Facebook and Apple have cooperated successfully in the past to offer people great social experiences and we look forward to doing so in the future.”

But clearly there’s more to the story.

Because while Facebook isn’t connected to Ping right now, it had been up through the service’s launch last night. And even for some time after that.

When Jobs demoed the service onstage yesterday, screenshots showed an ability to invite Facebook friends via the “Facebook Connect” service, as Business Insider’s Dan Frommer noted. And in an interview with Kara Swisher following the event, Apple marketing boss talked up the Facebook Connect option.

And, in fact, Apple’s promotional Ping page still mentions the ability to “find even more music fans with a quick search, by sending email invites, or by connecting to your Facebook account.”

And for a brief period after the service opened last night, new users did get a chance to invite friends via Facebook — you can still see the Facebook app page here.

I’m not sure that the service ever worked, though: When I tried the Facebook option, I got this puzzling error message: “We are unable to find any Facebook friends that you are not following on iTunes Ping. Check again soon.”

So. Anyone at Apple, or Facebook, want to clarify what happened?

Facebook says it will support Y Combinator companies with resources for products, technology and design, whether for new websites or Facebook applications.

Y Combinator companies will also get early access to Facebook technologies such as Facebook Credits, the virtual currency and payment service the company recently developed, and Facebook’s Instant Personalization service for third-party websites that use Facebook Connect, among other new features.

Y Combinator will publish a request for applications for its next incubator session, which will happen in Winter 2011. That program will include “social startups” that Facebook could assist.

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