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.

These search engines are, in the words of Google, organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful, and the best use we can make of them is to read up on the latest in the Gosselin scandal or dig up some paparazzi shots of Megan Fox? That’s just…sad.

Below, the 2009 “Zeitgeist” as viewed through the lenses of Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing.

GOOGLE

1. michael jackson
2. facebook
3. tuenti
4. twitter
5. sanalika
6. new moon
7. lady gaga
8. windows 7
9. dantri.com.vn
10. torpedo gratis

YAHOO

1. Michael Jackson
2. Twilight
3. WWE
4. Megan Fox
5. Britney Spears
6. Naruto
7. American Idol
8. Kim Kardashian
9. NASCAR
10. Runescape

BING

1. Michael Jackson
2. Twitter
3. Swine Flu
4. Stock Market
5. Farrah Fawcett
6. Patrick Swayze
7. Cash for Clunkers
8. Jon and Kate Gosselin
9. Billy Mays
10. Jaycee Dugard

I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that Twitter has replaced a cumbersome and completely nonintuitive process with one that makes more sense. That’s good, right?

The flip side is that spam really isn’t one of Twitter’s most pressing problems.

In fact, Twitter’s antispam qualities were one of its best features from the very start: “Spam” on Twitter isn’t like other services’ spam since no one can actually send you spam and clog up your inbox. You only see it if you’re gazing at messages that include your name. So it’s aesthetically offensive, but not the kind of thing that actually makes Twitter less useful.

In the more proactive category: Twitter’s “lists” feature, which curates interesting groups of Twitter users to follow, should debut next week, I’m told. This one does tackle a more significant problem for Twitter: New users come to the site and have no idea what to do or whom to pay attention to. (Twitter’s quasicontroversial “Suggested Users List” doesn’t really cut it, though it does drive Robert Scoble nuts, which is amusing.)

And in the time-to-get-serious category: Actual revenue generation. Twitter’s giant cash pile means the company doesn’t have to start making money anytime soon. But it’s going to start trying, I’m told, with a series of…well, I heard them described by someone familiar with the company’s plans as “experiments.” Alternate name for them: “Don’t freak out if this stuff doesn’t work.”

We already know what one of them is: A plan to sell both Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) access to Twitter’s data stream. But I’m told we should see other kinda-sorta trials in coming months.

This week I tested a solution that might have made my quest for boots a little simpler. Snipi, which became available as a free download from Snipi.com on Monday, helps you organize your online-shopping results by gathering, or “snipping,” product information from Web pages and saving the information to lists.

These lists are stored on your personalized Snipi page, where you can access them later. Snipi also can save photos and videos to lists. And it has a coordinating iPhone app that shows up-to-date versions of the lists created on the computer, so you can have them with you on the go.

The Snipi Toolbar collects and displays the user’s online research.

To do all this, you use the Snipi Toolbar, a horizontal window that pops up within your browser so you never have to navigate away from the site where you’re shopping. If you see an item you like, simply drag and drop an image of it into the toolbar, where details about the item — including its title, price and image — are automatically filled in. If the item was previously snipped by another Snipi user, a description box will be filled with whatever that person wrote or pasted in from the product page; you can fill in the box yourself, too.

Snipi has a partnership with Shopzilla Inc., so the Snipi Toolbar also has comparison shopping built in: It displays links to Web sites where your snipped product, or products like it, can be found at lower prices.

One of the big drawbacks to Snipi is that it currently works only as a browser plug-in with Mozilla’s Firefox, not Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer or Apple’s (AAPL) Safari. Snipi says it plans to introduce versions of its toolbar — though less functional ones — for IE and Safari by early to mid-June. Even so, downloading and installing a browser plug-in isn’t yet a routine thing for most people. And often, people who use plug-ins forget to keep them up-to-date.

Another downside to Snipi is that its comparison-pricing feature failed with apparel. The feature only really worked when used with “hard goods” like electronics, which are sold at retailers that participate in price-comparison networks. Yet Snipi still makes pricing suggestions for clothing and shoes, however irrelevant. For example, when I snipped a $150 Banana Republic dress, a link to $16 eye shadow sold at Sephora.com appeared in the Price Compare column. To reduce confusion, Snipi shouldn’t make such suggestions for apparel.

A handy feature built into the Snipi Toolbar lets you immediately share items via email or post them on Facebook, Twitter or WordPress blogs. This would have been useful while I was shopping online for boots because I could have more quickly shared my finds with friends, rather than copying and pasting URLs into emails.

While browsing on BestBuy.com (BBY), I found a Sony (SNE) Cybershot DSC-W220 with 12 megapixels and a 4x zoom lens for $199. Selecting a small icon in the Firefox browser’s bottom right corner, I opened the Snipi Toolbar and created a “Digicams” list, including the Sony. Snipi suggested alternative prices for this camera, including $159 for the same thing on Amazon.com (AMZN).

I got an early start on bathing-suit shopping by browsing Web sites for J. Crew, Victoria’s Secret and Macy’s. As expected, the price-comparison suggestions didn’t make sense. For one $58 Victoria’s Secret bathing suit, Snipi suggested a list of alternatives, including a $170 Kohler shower door, $203 Giorgio Armani glasses and an $82 corded telephone. I assure you that the bathing suit looked nothing like any of those items.

Confusing alternatives aside, I liked using the Snipi Toolbar as a place to gather my online research. It displayed images of items neatly lined up in a row, and when I selected an item, the description appeared. Someone like my sister, who is planning a wedding, might enjoy using the Snipi Toolbar for saving photos of various locations in a list she could call “Wedding Venues.” She could then share the entire list with me in one step. Or she could go visit some of the places and bring an iPhone with the Snipi app to see her list.

I tried the iPhone app, and it was a cinch to tap My Lists to see the online research I’d gathered. Here, as on the browser toolbar, visuals make it easy to glance through many products.

The toolbar can save various lists that you name and categorize into Shop, Photos or Videos, and these can be kept private, shared with friends or made public. Public lists are seen by all other users on Snipi.com, which is also a social-networking site. I wouldn’t use it as such, because I already rely on other social-networking outlets, but some people might.

Snipi, which uses a guessing algorithm to fill in details like a product’s price, says its toolbar will improve as more people use it. If you do a lot of research or online shopping or you simply want an online tool for saving images and videos from the Web, Snipi will work well for you. Its price-comparison suggestions need some improvement, but I felt more organized after using the Snipi Toolbar for a week’s worth of browsing.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

But what about making lists of things you’ve already done? Not summaries of the errands you ran in a day but broader catalogs of the things you’ve experienced throughout your life? This week, I tested a new Web site called Meosphere.com that encourages users to check off lists related to topics ranging from cars they owned to former hairstyles to countries they visited. When the answers from these lists are compiled, they create a meosphere (emphasis on “me”), or an overall glance at one’s life history.

Meosphere.com, by Meosphere LLC, was launched in March as a way to catalog details about yourself or someone else, like a Web-based memory book. It offers some 2,500 lists, and new lists are added daily by users and site managers. But its users soon wanted to share their meospheres with others, forcing the site to steer more toward social networking and connecting people by letting them share and compare meospheres.

Meosphere.com users fill in lists to create profiles of themselves that they can compare with others.

This free site is a lot of fun to use, not to mention addictive. Once you start checking off items in one list, you’ll want to complete other lists to beef up your meosphere. And when friends and family share their meosphere with you, you’ll learn things you never knew about them (apparently, my sister has been to Monaco). You’ll also be reminded of things you should add to your own meosphere. When you encounter a list item that you’ve not seen or done, you can add it to a separate To Do list, and community comments appear beside each list.

The site’s social-networking aspects leave room for improvement. But Meosphere has its own To Do list in the works. By the end of this month, users will contact one another through the site. And by next month, users will designate “friends” and view and compare multiple meospheres on one page, versus currently only being able to do so with two. A “meosphere match” feature will also be introduced in July; it will find and point you to meospheres similar to yours.

Web sites know how valuable lists can be; wish lists and automatically generated recommendation lists provide encouragement for online shoppers. Other sites exist specifically to promote list-making, such as the Amazon.com-owned 43things.com, which encourages users to set goals of 43 things they hope to do before they die.

On Monday, Meosphere extended its reach by announcing its presence on Facebook.com, letting users share their meosphere with others through Facebook’s profile page. On Meosphere.com, you can generate a Web link for your meosphere, making it easy to paste into a blog, personal Web site or an email.

Starting out with Meosphere is simple, though its navigation is a little rough. The site’s many lists are broken down into categories on the home page. These broader topics include Books, Places, Arts and Entertainment and Events. Selecting any of these topics lets you drill down into specific categories. The Books category, for example, led me to Fiction, which led me to Classics and then to Jane Austen Books You’ve Read. I check-marked four of the listed books and chose to add “Mansfield Park” to my To Do list by clicking on an icon beside this title. You can also rate items on a list; selecting a thumbs-up icon for a favorite Jane Austen title, for example, means that this rating will appear beside the title on your meosphere.

After finishing the list, I selected Update My Meosphere to add this list’s data to my profile. If you don’t have an account set up with Meosphere yet, you can quickly do it here. A nickname is designated in place of your real name, for privacy, and it’s also here where you opt whether to share your content with others.

Your Meosphere can be viewed in folio (list) format or in a graphical view, which looks cool but, unlike folio view, can’t be used to compare your meosphere side-by-side with someone else’s. In the future, users may be able to compare as many as four meospheres at a time in folio view; the company says that showing more than four starts to look confusing.

A link at the top right of the screen labeled “My Meosphere” takes you to an organized view of your data. It shows all of the lists that you’ve filled in, arranged from most recent to oldest, and compiles the comments that you’ve posted with each list. These comments can be shared with the community or kept private; either way they create a collection of remarks that the site calls My Journal.

Another icon at the top of the page labeled Meosphere Home jumps you back to the home page of lists. You can also search for lists by typing in a search box or by choosing lists related to specific locations. Ads appear on each page, but these are pushed to the far right of the screen, so they aren’t invasive. Plus, most ads are related to the list that you’re filling in.

Some of the lists that are geographically related use a map for checking off locations (like countries or U.S. states) by selecting them on the map. After comparing my meosphere with my sister’s, she was all too quick to remind me that I had been to Montana during a family trip that involved a multitude of national parks, a lot of car time and a stop in Billings. One of the funniest lists I filled in was titled Fads You’ve Done, Bought or Worn; it walked me down memory lane as I read the items and checked off Leg Warmers, Electric Slide Dance and Jelly Shoes. Another list that made me laugh out loud was Hairstyles You’ve Worn — ah, the ’80s.

When I filled in a list of Broadway musicals I’ve seen, I was reminded of a few I had forgotten. And every meosphere that was shared with me taught me something about the sender.

Chances are that almost everyone you meet has done something fascinating, but it’s not always easy for people to spit out these facts about themselves. Meosphere gives you a chance to do so, through the Web. But while it allows you to share your interesting personal stories, it just as easily lets you keep them to yourself for your own records. I hope that when this site implements improved social-networking features in the next couple of months, it will retain its simple interface and spirited purpose.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com