It’s hard to compete with FaceBook – they have so much of my context already. They know my “social graph”, as they say, and it’s a great pain to replicate that graph elsewhere.

Rumor is Google plans to compete with FaceBook on openness. That’s great. Open is wonderful and airy. And Fuzzy.

But it actually makes sense. When I think of what irks me about FaceBook, it’s where FaceBook is not open. For example, they don’t allow me to take my list of friends with me off FaceBook (even scraping is against their TOS). They don’t send me actual updates; only emails instructing me to check FaceBook for updates. They don’t have very good portability – you have to use the Website, as opposed to, say, Twitter, which has a plethora of interfaces, from SMS to IM to various desktop apps.

Google already knows a lot of my social network – it’s in my gmail account. It just acquired Jaiku, which is probably the most capable multi-device, multi-interface company out there. It hired Brad Fitzpatrick, who’s determined to open the social graph.

So if Google ends up offering an open social network with support for third party apps where my “social graph” data is belong to me and can be reached from any and all devices and most of my friends are already on there and my existing blog is seamlessly integrated in, then I’d be interested.

And there’s really no reason Google couldn’t do that. The only hitch I see is FaceBook’s willingness to allow monetization of apps to be completely owned by the app owner. It’s not in Google’s nature to be that open with monetization; they like to take their secret cut and give you what they deem appropriate.

There’s no reason Yahoo couldn’t do it either. Yahoo actually has more of my social graph – between Mail and Messenger, that’s everybody I know. Then there’s flickr. So many properties could be put to use…

So let’s see what happens Nov 5th.