Well, we’ve fought about it. Made noise about it. And you’re witnessing two giants (Google and Facebook) fighting over our social networks. Here, let’s discover my social network:

Robert Scoble (Friend of:)

• -Mike Arrington
• -Louis Gray
• -Sarah Lacy
• -Kara Swisher
• -About 4,997 other people

Now, why is this little tree so important? Why shouldn’t I be able to copy this little tree over to, say, FriendFeed or Twitter or Upcoming.org or Yelp or Flickr or Google’s Friend Connect?

Easy. There’s a TON of money in that little tree and the hundreds of millions of little trees that YOU have added into Facebook and MySpace and other places.

How do I know that? Well, there’s a little stealth company that I’ve started hearing about. Media6.

A friend told me about them. They figured out that if, say, Mike Arrington buys something, that his friends are two to 10 times more likely than the general public to buy the same thing. Take that into advertising on Facebook: if Mike clicks on, say, a CocaCola ad, Media6 knows that his friends are far more likely to click on that ad than the rest of the 100 million people on Facebook.

So what is Media6 doing? How are they building a database of all of this info? I hear they are making deals with all sorts of advertisers over on Facebook to have a little line of JavaScript added along with their advertisement. That is letting them build a super database of everyone and their friend networks (their social graphs).

This is what I don’t get about Facebook’s stance: I’ve already shown you two companies that are figuring out how to get access to Facebook’s social graph data without even getting on Facebook’s radar screen. The first is Minggl, who uses a toolbar to download all your social graph data to your browser where it’ll be a lot more useful to you and now we have Media6, who is building a huge database of you, and your advertising-clicking behaviors.

Now are you getting it? Advertisers will go to Media6 because they’ll be able to better match up ads with people who are much more likely to buy the stuff they are hawking.

I bet Facebook is building its own internal database of exactly the same data too.

Truth is your social graph tells the world a HUGE amount about you. Facebook doesn’t want you to move that other places easily.

Translation: there are billions of dollars at stake here.

Mike Arrington and I had a sometimes violent disagreement on today’s Gillmor Gang.

The reason we were arguing? Because we both were arguing different things.

Mike Arrington was arguing that Facebook was in the wrong for blocking Google Friend Connect (and therefor I was wrong).

I was arguing that if you 1. Friend me AND 2. Give me your email address that I should be able to put that email address into whatever system I so please, just like when you hand me your business card (and therefor that Arrington was wrong).

Problem is, that it took a bit of yelling and screaming for us to realize we were arguing about different things. During the show I put my phone on mute and took a shower (actually true) and when I came back on I took a different tactic and agreed with Mike on the first issue.

On the second issue he’s still wrong, but we’ll get to argue that one out again some other day.

Truth be told I thought that Google pulled email addresses into Friend Connect. I was wrong. Google doesn’t.

So, Facebook is totally over the top wrong to block Google.

But, lately, Facebook has been on the wrong side of the block button. Whoever runs that button is really hurting Facebook’s brand and not doing Facebook any favors.

So, let’s back up and split this argument into a few pieces and argue about those separately in three groups:

1. Your social graph (IE, the map of who your friends are).
2. Your friends’ info (IE, their email addresses, their birthdays, their relationship status, their political leanings, their gender, their favorite music and activities, and other stuff you’ll find on, say, Facebook’s profile).
3. Your actual data. Say your photos, your videos, your status updates, and your wall posts.

If you’re going to talk about social network portability you MUST keep these three things separate.

Why? Because of user expectations.

So, what are our user expectations around the social graph? Well, Facebook already makes those almost totally public. I can see the social graphs of people who haven’t even friended me. That said, there are a few people who’ve blocked me from seeing who their friends are, but only a handful of people have done that.

How about user expectations around your friends’ info? Well, if you friend me and give me access to your data, you should expect me to use that data, even outside of Facebook. But there are some users who don’t want you to take that data outside of Facebook. Arrington’s one of those.

How about your actual data? User expectations here are far different. We want to have control of our own data, and we don’t expect other users to be able to copy our photos or videos to other places.

So, basically, Mike Arrington and I agree on the social graph. You should be able to take your list of friends, their avatars, and their names to any other social network.

We disagree on our info like email addresses and such. I don’t think we’ll ever agree there.

I believe we agree on the control of our actual data.

How about you? Do you agree with this assessment? Do you get as passionate about this stuff as Mike and I did?

UPDATE: Marc Canter says “I do not compromise” and posted a bunch of pictures of his backyard fence which is most interesting.