Without a doubt, the hottest news of the moment is yesterday’s launch of Facebook Connect and rival service, Google Friend Connect. The ensuing brouhaha is easily understood — these guys are changing the shape of the web as we know it, and laying the foundation of the future social web to come. Both services allow users to take their social profile with them when they browse the web, suddenly opening the doors to a boatload of possibility for third party sites.

ReadWriteWeb points to a slide deck from ad agency Razorfish which imagines the possibilities if players like Amazon or iTunes implemented either service. It’s also thrown open the conversation around a deeper underlying issue that the launches bring to the fore: whether Facebook’s propietary technology will win out over the open source OpenID authentication tech employed by Google Friend Connect. In true geeked out fashion, the RRW guys have started a collaborative mindmap charting the issues.

Eric Eldon at VentureBeat thinks Google will struggle to best Facebook in this battle for position (which Mathew Ingram calls a nerd fight), because it lacks a popular social network to provide user relationships on other sites … [or] a home social network to drive user interactions across sites.

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch sums up : “When you drill down into the technical details, there are some differences between Friend Connect and FB Connect. But ultimately, what is at stake here is what will become the identity and data portability standard on the Web, and who will control it. While Friend Connect is taking a more open-standards approach, Facebook has the users and the momentum.”

Meanwhile Dave Winer chucks a bucket of cold water over the argument, saying: “The solution to the problem these guys are supposedly working on won’t come in this generation, it can only come when people start over. They are too mired in the complexities of the past to solve this one. Both companies are getting ready to shrink. It’s the last gasp of this generation of technology.

For a clue to how deeply mired in crud we are right now, check out this discussion among users and developers about OpenID. No one has a clue what problem its supposed to solve.”

That Google slideshow everyone’s been talking about
Whether or not Winer is right about future shrinkage, Google is still king of the playground right now, hence this recommended viewing from first Jeff Jarvis then Jeremiah Owyang. The latter says: “This slideshare presentation by French consulting firm faberNovel dissects Google’s business model, analyzes strength and weakness in each of the markets they are involved with and brings clarity to how some services are loss leaders and how monetization happens from it’s connected product suite. Do take time to look at the page rank formula.”