Now that a week's gone by and the dust has settled, we have a much clearer picture of what happened last week when Google announced it's "revolutionary" OpenSocial initiative. What was initially considered a checkmate move by Google in the chess game with Facebook, now seems more like an attempt to "PR scoop" a worthy adversary. I found the following posts extremely rational responses to the initial "the sky is falling" posts that happened on day one.

On 11/2/07, Don Dodge from Microsoft's Emerging Business Team wrote about Facebook's critical mass of members, unresolved questions about the privacy issues with OpenSocial and the fact the announcement was really focused on developers not users which, by the way, are joining Facebook at the rate of 200k/day.

Also on 11/2/07, Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester wrote on "Explaining OpenSocial to Your Executives." In this post he outlines what it is, the opportunities, challenges and next steps to consider. Jeremiah broadly suggests a "wait and see" approach and promised to continue surfacing opinions.

On 11/6/07 (1:55am PT), after a weekend to take a deep breath (or three), Om Malik wrote how this is the first "defensive move" by a company (Google) who has shown a propensity to stay on the offensive. He suggests this is a battle between the "public and private" internet. Google relies on access to public web traffic (consumer behavior) to continue to grow it's ad base (and command huge multiples). Facebook is creating a massive private information store of consumer behavior and won't let Google in. You can almost cut the tension with a knife!

Also on 11/6/07 (later in the day), Dave Winer wrote on "Why Google Launched OpenSocial." He believes it was all about creating noise ahead of Facebook's announcement of a new, targeted advertising platform, which he believes will complete (and potentially) supplant Google's ad options as the vehicle of choice in the long term.

So where does this leave us? Google still has replationships and critical mass in the targeted online ad game. Will Facebook chip away at their leadership position by offering advertisers a better alternative? Will Google trump Facebook by creating a similar offering using it's partners in the OpenSocial initiative. What do you think? How will this all shake out?