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Who will be the web’s primary identity platform?

Google’s trying to stay in the fight by integrating Twitter across its 9 million Friend Connect web sites. That means you can log into a Google Friend Connect site with your Twitter profile and share that new membership with your friends and along with other interesting content.

Now keep in mind that most of those 9 million member sites are part of Google Blogger, which automatically got included in the platform when it launched. This will help those sites find new audiences and promote the Friend Connect identity to others.

What’s interesting is the timing. It comes on the same day Facebook announced a massive integration with Yahoo’s properties, handing the social network an additional way to reach 500 million people. A big win. Yahoo users can use their Facebook log-ins to see what their friends are doing on its properties and share that activity back to their social network.

Google, however, doesn’t really have a large sharing platform. It has Orkut and Google Reader, but those haven’t found the same traction Twitter or Facebook has with audiences closing in on half a billion users. It also wants to prevent the growth of closed or unfriendly ecosystems. So it’s turning to Twitter in a reactive move against its emerging competitor Facebook.

But this gives Twitter and Facebook more of a duopoly on data around our identities and social relationships. Is this ultimately what we want?

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