According to a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal [a paid publication], there is some frustration among loyal Facebook users. In the web site's search for monetization, there are some new features that do things like track user behavior off of Facebook.com. The hope is that this will help to create improved targeting for advertising messages.

But, it's also raising some privacy concerns.

So, might this be an opening for Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) to get a bigger piece of the social networking space?

Well, I had a chance to interview Robb Hecht, who is an expert on social networking and the operator of MEDIA 2.0. Hecht -- who doesn't consult for either company -- thinks that Google's new system – called OpenSocial – has lots of promise and could be an edge in the social networking war:

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) set up its OpenSocial technology so that developers could build applications for a number of social networks without having to tailor their software for each of them -- one common standard for a large number of sites to accelerate programming.

Google has its own social network site Orkut, but it has not made much progress against larger rivals Facebook and News Corp's (NYSE: NWS) MySpace. But the search company's new effort is aimed at preventing developers from spending all of their efforts targeting the two largest networks. That program got a big lift yesterday when the largest website in the category, MySpace, adopted OpenSocial.

"OpenSocial is going to be the de facto standard for developers right out of the gates," said MySpace chief executive and cofounder Chris DeWolfe during a press conference, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Google may have lost out to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) in its bid to own a piece of Facebook, but that may matter less now. As The New York Times points out: "OpenSocial is designed to allow third-party companies and developers to create one set of programs that works across the Web's most popular social networks. Facebook, in contrast, asks developers to tailor their programs for the network in its own proprietary format. The Google group is counting that developers will eschew that extra effort and want to avoid any lock-in with one social network."

Facebook has now been painted into a corner, and Microsoft's investment may not look quite so good just a week after it was announced.

Once again, Google has shown why it is so attractive to Wall Street. It will beat you if you don't join it.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

After all the ink spilled last week over Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)'s investment in social-phenom Facebook (see Peter Cohan's interesting piece on Facebook's valuation), search giant Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is countering today with an interesting announcement: It is creating a distribution network for social networking tools.

You ask: A what?

Part of what makes Facebook's social networking environment interesting is that it's become a platform for software development. Like Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM)'s developer network, Facebook provides a platform, complete with tools, that allows third-party applications to be deployed within the Facebook milieu. Applications like iLike (with over 6 million registered users, 300,000 news users per day and a management team that rivals the U.S. Olympic basketball team) allow software developers to reach and interact (and eventually make some bling) with Facebook users within the Facebook environment.

Google also has third-party tools, deftly describes as "widgets." Like Facebook, Google provides a platform for third-party developers to build applications that reside within users' personalized homepages (iGoogle pages in Google parlance) and -- just announced recently -- on those publisher sites that work with Google's cash cow advertising platform, AdSense.