I don’t care what anyone says, I will wait for a Google Android-powered mobile phone. As much as I’m drawn to Apple’s iPhone it’s too expensive, closed and there’s too much carrier lock-in. An Android-based device will give me the device I want, the way I want it, on the carrier I want. Now, that’s worth waiting for.

Mmm. The timing of my previous post was pretty good. What luck! If I’d put it off a day then the announcement by Google of their Open Social initiative would have made my post a little less prescient. I didn’t exactly hit the nail on the head put I think I was at least fiddling around with the right nail.

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about what Google is planning to do in the face of the popularity of Facebook. I believe that what Google will slowly roll out is exactly what they have been planning to roll out before Facebook exploded.

Their task is relatively simple - just let users join the dots between their existing products and keep the results nice and open - a la Google Maps. I can envisage people unconsciously rolling their own tailor-made networks, free from the silo-ed nature of Facebook, just by linking together their own personal combination of Google products. We’ll decide what combination of Talk, Desktop, Gmail, Reader, Video, Maps, Notebook, Jaiku, Shared Items, Blogger, Calendar, Orkut etc. etc - you get the idea - is right for us and our friends.

And it will happen slowly and gradually. One day we’ll wake up and suddenly realise Google is at the heart of our social network and we didn’t even notice.

Random thought: iGoogle - the place where it all happens.