By Michal Lev-Ram

Google is expected to unveil its mobile phone plans on Monday. That would end two years of speculation that the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant has been working on a cell phone or, as has been more recently suggested, a mobile operating system for multiple manufacturers and devices.

A source close to T-Mobile and Sprint confirmed to Fortune that the companies are likely to be the first U.S. mobile operators to carry Google-powered cell phones, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Taiwanese phonemaker HTC has been named as a potential Google partner, which sources close to the company have also confirmed.

The question, though, is whether Google can change the wireless carriers’ long-entrenched ways, in which they insist to a large degree on controlling what phones and software their customers use. Google has publicly stated that consumers should be able to download any software they wish, and use any mobile device with whatever wireless network they prefer. The company has lobbied the Federal Communications Commission to adopt such an approach in an upcoming auction of wireless spectrum. Google has also said it plans to bid in that auction, though it’s not clear what its long-term plans would be if it won.

Even if Google doesn’t become a wireless operator, getting the established carriers to carry phones compatible with the company’s software and services will be a potential boon.

“Any device Google brings would be a big positive for the entire wireless industry,” says Robert Laikin, CEO of wireless distribution company Brightpoint. “Consumer awareness would increase as it relates to what converged devices can really do.”

By Josh Quittner

It looks inevitable that Facebook will move away from its proprietary platform to the open platform of OpenSocial. Indeed, sources tell me that representatives from Facebook and Google (GOOG) met for the first time late yesterday afternoon. And already, Facebook investor and board member Jim Breyer is indicating that the social network would be willing to join the Everybody-but-Facebook Alliance.

Meanwhile, a favorite parlor game yesterday afternoon among pundits here in Techland was playing “What Should Facebook Do?” — though most of the people I spoke to were unwilling to go on the record. Virtually everyone’s answers however, boiled down to three options:

1. Do nothing. Facebook has a surprising amount of power in this relationship. It has 50 million members and continues to grow. As long as that’s the case, developers will continue to craft apps in FBML, its proprietary platform language.

2. Surrender, totally and at once. Converting Facebook’s platform to open HTML isn’t difficult from a programming standpoint or particularly time-consuming. Besides, developers will love it. Many have privately griped that Facebook’s platform is too gnarly and they look forward to simple HTML and Javascript. And no one I’ve spoken to can find any real problem with this shift from Facebook’s perspective — indeed, the move should benefit Facebook since its members will be able to stay put, where FB can serve ads at them, while doing more outside the walls of FB.

3. Some combination of 1 & 2.

One person who was willing to go on the record was John Lilly, COO of the Mozilla Corporation, whom I had dinner with last night. Who better to talk about the virtues of openness? Lilly, in fact, made me think that Option 3 was the smartest way to go. If he were running Facebook, he said, “I would not let Google take the ‘open’ mantle from the world.” He said that if Facebook decides that it needs to move from FBML to HTML — “and I’m not saying I’d necessarily do that if I were Facebook.” But if he did, “I’d cause Google some problems first.”

How? “If I were Facebook, I wouldn’t let Google say, ‘We are the Web.’ I’d call b.s. on them,” Lilly said. OpenSocial isn’t open! It’s a Google-run alliance; Google is calling the shots and is in charge of running the thing. But that’s kind of bogus since theoretically, it could cause OpenSocial to move in ways that benefited it. True open standards initiatives tend to be run by open boards.

Of course, the down side to working with open-standards boards is they tend to move very slowly. Google is known for having little patience for that sort of thing.

One person I spoke to, who asked to remain anonymous because he is close to the current action, said challenging Google on whether OpenSocial was truly open was a red herring: “It’s a false challenge,” this person argued. “Even if Google has significant control over the API, the way it’s inevitably going to get controlled in reality is by the interoperable implementations that that people actually use. Interoperability itself will be the glue that keeps it from becoming proprietary. This is a dynamic that has worked very well for Internet standards over the years including HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP itself, despite some very large and dominant vendors who would have preferred to take control of things like those. ” He also referenced this Anil Dash piece, which provides all the ammo you need to support the inevitability of Option 2.

By Michael V. Copeland

It has been an interesting few days watching Silicon Valley’s most powerful company, Google, fend off technology’s latest adolescent darling, Facebook. That of course, is what Google’s (GOOG) OpenSocial initiative is all about, pitting its new-born social networking platform against Facebook’s six-month-old social networking platform. And while these two companies battle it out for the opportunity to capture our time with the useful as well as the utterly inane, the people caught in the crossfire are guys like Ali Partovi.

Partovi is the CEO of iLike, an online music discovery site that happens to be among the most popular Facebook applications. Like many of the apps on Facebook, the one-year-old iLike began life as a web site, trying to attract an audience and build its own social network around the subject of music – what are you listening to? check this out, are you going to this show? You get it.

iLike struggled to find that audience until it put up a widget on Facebook. By tapping into Facebook’s massive built-in membership (now approaching 50 million), the music application was quickly downloaded by a few million people. Today, it is the sixth most actively used widget on Facebook with 611,599 people swapping music tidbits daily. That makes iLike the No. 1 Facebook music application.

You would think Partovi might stick by his Facebook pals, but he’s happy to take his set of music toys and also play with Google. The search giant’s OpenSocial initiative is creating standards to allow widget makers like Partovi to tap into all social networks that are part of the Google alliance. Rather than crafting a different application to meet different standards at each social network, he just does it once. “OpenSocial is the best thing that possibly could have happened to us,” Partovi says. “There’s no incremental cost to developing for all these different networks, but there is the incremental benefit of being everywhere.”

Developers like Partovi are the first to tell you that they are all about creating new widgets for the platform that has the most people, makes it easiest for them, and pays them the most. Very few third-party applications on Facebook are making any real money, and it remains to be seen if there is much of a business there for anyone but Facebook and a handful of top independent developers like iLike. But even iLike, RockYou and Slide understand that Facebook by itself isn’t enough, so they’re all going to OpenSocial.

Their move to different networks may help answer the question, who owns the user? Is it the social network or the widget makers? Slide founder Max Levchin is building his business around the idea that he owns the user. So is Partovi. But so is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. It will be interesting to see if Facebook members follow Partovi to LinkedIn, MySpace (NWS), Bebo, Hi5 and the other social networks that are going Google. It may well be that there are enough social network addicts around the world to go around, but it seems more likely that one network wins at the expense of the others. Just ask MySpace.

For now, guys like Partovi are sitting pretty as platforms compete for his attention. But there are signs that the things could get ugly fast. There are persistent rumors that Facebook is about to launch its own music application that would compete with iLike (now there’s a play from the Microsoft (MSFT) platform book). That is the danger of building a business on top of someone else’s platform. It’s theirs, and they will do with it what they want.