Rabee Elbes

Google is a company convinced of its own brilliance and its clear vision of the future. Being a hotbed of Mensa members will do that to you. As will stumbling early onto an obscenely lucrative business model. The same thing happened to a company called Microsoft.But that doesn’t mean that the fundamental rules of the universe don’t apply – immutable things like Newton’s gravity or Murphy’s Law. I bring this up because Google has just announced two extraordinarily ambitious strategic gambits in the span of a week, and I’m not convinced that it can pull either of them off.

First the company announced OpenSocial, a hasty attempt to smother social-network phenom Facebook by pulling together an alliance of more than 50 of that upstart’s peers and competitors. The idea is twofold: to make it easier for software developers to build universally compatible applications and to open up social websites to newfangled forms of targeted “social advertising,” something Facebook actually started offering the next week.

Then Google (Charts) took the wraps off something even bigger: a grand plan to redefine the cellphone. Through the so-called Open Handset Alliance, Google will provide software and programming protocols for others to employ in building a new class of smartphone handsets and cellular information services. Once again, the unspoken goal is to create handheld billboards for blasting even more ads at us.

Those initiatives are both what Silicon Valley calls “platforms” – standards for independent developers to write programs that extend the utility of a device or service. Ever since Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500) and Intel defined the architecture of the PC, establishing a platform has been the holy grail of ambitious high-tech companies.

But in reality there aren’t that many genuine computing platforms around, because it is extremely difficult to design and support them in a way that pleases all constituencies. Apple (Charts, Fortune 500) has managed to establish its Macintosh platform by keeping the options for independent developers rather narrow – application software and computer peripherals only – and is being extremely careful as it turns the iPhone into a genuine platform. Microsoft, which has huge built-in advantages because it has by far the most experience with platforms, has been working for more than a decade with only mixed success on its Windows Mobile platform for handheld computers and smartphones. This kind of software is hard.

As capable as Google is, the company has never really masterminded a platform before. And there’s a whiff of Tom Sawyer to these strategies; Google is trying to get its partners and the open-source software community to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

It all sounds great, especially if you don’t think about how much harder it will be to avoid the relentless barrage of advertising sure to come. But as even Microsoft could tell you, neither platform gambit is a sure bet. Google doesn’t seem to take into account the most fundamental rule of high tech: Don’t mistake a clear view for a short distance. 

Facebook, the popular social networking site, has ridden the hype curve up and down in recent months, reaching a low Tuesday over claims that a month-old advertising system violates members’ privacy. CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a big step Wednesday toward silencing naysayers – one of whom was my own colleague Josh Quittner – when he issued a contrite apology and made a key change to the new advertising feature, dubbed Beacon.

“We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature,” acknowledged Zuckerberg, “but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.”

A little history: When Facebook, the popular social networking site, announced its strategy to host applications created by outsiders in May, the world and the press was dazzled – none more than me. Facebook found itself on the covers of magazines and the lips of Silicon Valley.

Then, in October, Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500) bested Google (Charts, Fortune 500), winning the right to invest $240 million for 1.6 percent of Facebook and a new contract to display ads on the site. The deal valued Facebook at $15 billion. Meanwhile, the number of active members, 24 million in May, has soared to 57 million. Suddenly, Facebook was king of the hill.

Aiming to capitalize on its newfound acclaim and scale, Facebook announced its bold new advertising strategy in November. But Zuckerberg made a few strategic errors. First, he showed a touch of hubris when he intoned portentously to ad executives in New York during the announcement: “Once every 100 years, the way that media works fundamentally changes.”

Much worse, one part of the new Beacon ad system had not been fully thought through. It automatically alerts a member’s friends when she buys a new product or rents a movie. But the features intended to allow the member to control this alert system were hard to find and insufficient.

Journalists dug up unfortunate cases, like the wife who was automatically informed by Facebook of the ring her husband bought her as a Christmas present. Consumer and privacy watchdog groups began darkly criticizing Facebook’s “disregard” for members’ privacy. Meanwhile, a group called “Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!” has 68,000 members, which isn’t much for a service with 57 million users but enough to send a clear signal that people are upset.

The blogosphere – and in its wake, much of the mainstream press – went wild with derision. Here was Baker’s maxim come to life. We built them up and now we were going to bring them down.

What do you think of Facebook’s future?

Though Facebook has progressively taken measures to address the problems, the 23 year-old Zuckerberg until now had said nothing about the latest brouhaha. He broke his silence Wednesday with an apology to members and a fresh promise not to broadcast a member’s buying habits without her explicit approval. In a key move, he also allowed members to turn off Beacon.

Still, questions linger, including how much member information is pinging around the Net without permission or knowledge. If Zuckerberg stays attuned to these and any other ongoing concerns, the controversy will go away and Facebook will be as strong as ever. After all, that’s what happened when he wrote a letter of apology last year after a much bigger on-service protest erupted over a new Facebook feature that tells friends what other friends are doing on the site.

At first, the outcry over the Newsfeed feature was fierce. But then Facebook tweaked the feature, Zuckerberg apologized, and protesters realized they were making much ado about nothing. Newsfeed became one of Facebook’s most popular features. It’s also become part of the essential infrastructure for the viral dissemination of third-party Facebook applications created since May.

Until now, Zuckerberg’s silence has fueled press anger over Beacon and Zuckerberg’s apparent rigidity, including from my Fortune colleague, Josh Quittner, who argues Facebook may be dead.

Facebook is not anywhere near dead – and there’s zero chance it will be anytime soon, no matter how boneheaded some of its recent actions may have been. It would be virtually impossible for a new, as-yet-unheard-of service to come along and quickly steal Facebook users.

For all Facebook’s own successes, former social networking superstar MySpace, now owned by News Corp. (Charts, Fortune 500), remains larger than ever by most measures. It takes a lot of work for a member to create a useful Facebook (or MySpace) network. They won’t flee lightly.

And while Zuckerberg may not have listened to them until now, Facebook has several “old hands” in the management suite to help guide the young company. Chief operating officer Owen Van Natta and privacy boss Chris Kelly are both in their late 30s. Chief financial officer Gideon Yu is 36 years-old and Vice President for Sales Mike Murphy is 45. All are industry veterans.

Facebook remains a seminal part of today’s technology landscape. It’s changing the way many people around the world use the Internet. For me personally, it’s the first Web service to come along in a decade since MyYahoo where I routinely spend at least half an hour daily.

Josh ends his post by saying, “Facebook has turned all the people who rooted for it into a lynch mob. In the space of a month, it’s gone from media darling to devil.” He’s right about that. But it may say more about the press – and today’s blog-led penchant for sensationalism – than it does about Facebook.