Is Facebook’s Open Graph A Master Stroke?

The recent Facebook announcements were extremely interesting to me.  I continue to see a familiar pattern around relying too heavily on one platform.  From a developers standpoint, its hard to build a business if you don't own the very ground that you are building on.  I have blogged about this topic before and I still feel the same today.

The Open Graph announcement was extremely interesting to me.  It is super-smart and shrewd of Facebook to open up its platform outside of its walled garden.  We all don't have the specifics yet, but, it looks to be if you are outside of the FB world you can incorporate core functionality into your own site. TechCrunch's MG Siegler does a nice job covering it here.

I wonder what happens if this really takes off.  For one, you as a developer would be outsourcing key elements of your community capability to another  company.  But more interesting is what is the impact of large players like Google.  If you are Google, you've got to be worried about Facebook  eating up more capability and eyeballs by potentially incorporating more traffic reach into its own platform.  Heck, what if FB incorporates really great social search using the Open Graph technology.  This is all predicated on world-class execution, but, the FB Connect technology has been already adopted on many top sites. If you are Google would you decide to penalize sites that use Open Graph in natural search results?