I have to say, the geek in me is really enjoying all the drama that’s unfolding between Google and Apple these days. I love it from a gossipy, high-school point of view, but also because when two powerhouses like this do battle, consumers are sure to come out on top.

Google vs. Apple seems like an unlikely feud. One is a cloud-based search giant and open-source evangelist. The other an extremely closed off, locked-down product based inventor of cool. But as mentioned in this New York Times article, with two companies this massive, it was only a matter of time before they started treading into mutual turf and someone got their toes stepped on. In this case it was Apple who apparently got really pissed about Google’s audacity to enter the mobile phone market.

But as odd as that rivalry is, a less talked about but equally important one exists between Google and Facebook.

For me these seemed like two disparate companies aiming to achieve two different things with two different audiences. But peeling back the layers it's easy to see that they're actually after the exact same thing - your data.

As the social web has proven over the last few years we base so many of our choices on what our friends and contemporaries make. So when we want to know who had a good experience with a roofer or a plumber we ask our Facebook or Twitter friends for advice.

This makes social search the new Holy Grail of the search engine wars. In a perfect future Google would love to produce the exact search results you queried as well as what 5, 10 or all of your online friends suggest, recommend or have had dealings with.

What spooks Google (one would guess) is most of this information exists in the walled garden of Facebook (and other closed sites) and is inaccessible. Facebook knows it and is desperate to leverage it.

Again, this usually means good things for us. We have probably three of the most innovative and important techonolgy companies trying so hard to be first. First to deliver a must have product or service. And no matter who gets there first, we win (unless Apple gets there first, in which case that service or product will cost a small fortune).