But Facebook built their social graph on college campuses, and college is where you learn the schoolyard is no place for sharing anymore. At least the company gave a clear reason in language that echoes its official terms of use — unlike eBay's obviously anticompetitive moves to block first PayPal, and (after buying that company), Google Checkout, from leveraging its marketplace.

Is Facebook's move motivated by competitive rivalry? Probably. Can Google complain publicly that it's unfair? Nope. Looks like Facebook's hire of Elliot Schrage is already paying off in terms of dishing Google the company's own PR medicine. Ultimately, while Google's embrace of open standards makes it attractive to developers, users only care about one thing: whether websites work as expected, and don't surprise them by making their data pop up on other sites unawares.

Facebook evangelist Dave Morin touts the ability to take one's real identity from Facebook to other websites. And indeed, that's one reason why I mocked MySpace's move; its users' pseudonymous logins have no particular value as sources of identity.

But do I really want to interconnect all my online identities? That's the premise of the "data portability" movement — that we really want nothing more than to take our friends with us from one website to another. And yet I'm content to segregate, say, the work acquaintances I have on LinkedIn from the more personal relationships I track on Facebook. Would Valleywag's commenters want to have their real names attached to their accounts? Some are happy to, while for others, that's a deal-breaker — and the site would be the lesser if it lost them.

Mark Zuckerberg's original, brilliant insight — to connect Facebook's identities to real names, schools, and workplaces — is its advantage over rival social networks like Bebo and MySpace. But I'm not sure I want a Web with non anonymity. Morin and others will hasten to note Facebook's privacy options — but surely they realize that when others give up their anonymity, there will be peer pressure for most to do so.

Real identity has value, say, when conducting commerce, which is why it's laughable that eBay partnered with MySpace and not Facebook — just another sign of that company's clueless technological leadership. But anonymity has its benefits. Facebook Connect threatens the anonymous Web. For that reason, I can't wish Facebook Connect anything more than partial success.