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Speaking at a conference over the weekend, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe reportedly asked Facebook to join Google's OpenSocial initiative. Facebook COO Owen Van Natta politely rejected the idea. He said Facebook's developer platform protects user privacy better than the open standard.

That's probably true, but most would say the real reason Facebook won't join OpenSocial anytime soon is that it wants to keep developers to itself. Good theory, but good luck with that plan. Here's what a third-party developer working on app for both platforms told me. It's not really that hard to write a Facebook app in the company's proprietary FBML and then rework it for the OpenSocial platform. So maybe Facebook really is concerned about protecting user privacy. But if that's the case, then why doesn't it start its campaign closer to home?