Is Email the New Front in the Facebook/Google War?

Earlier this week, Facebook released its Social Inbox and set off a flurry of press about the perseverance of email and the epic battle between Google and Facebook. But this isn’t only about email, nor is the fight really between Google and Facebook (and others in the social web), because the relationships users have with each is vastly different (and fairly complimentary).

The rise of the social web (which in the interests of space I’ll simply call the Facebook Camp, but includes socially minded upstarts like LinkedIn, Twitter or Zynga) has encouraged most of us to pour all sorts of interesting data into the Internet, including our music preferences, our relationships, our likes and dislikes, our locations, etc. Facebook has done the best job of collecting this data from us. Of course, both Google and Facebook have amazing core assets when it comes to data about us. Google has leveraged amazing infrastructure assets to build productivity enhancing-applications I can no longer live without, such as Gmail, Search, Sites, Android, Maps, etc.

Monday’s announcement from Facebook that it’s entering the messaging space seemed one of the first head-on moves against my so-called Google Camp (which includes other large tech companies consumers rely on every day such as Yahoo, Apple and Microsoft). It quickly reignited deeply held opinions from my peers, many of whom worry about Facebook and all it knows about us. Not me. Some are convinced that, with their new messaging platform, Facebook has everything it needs to finalize world domination. Not me. But it appears the world wants a fight, and both camps seem ready to go.

Is there really a fight here? Of course, both camps want badly to control my identity. But there’s the problem. I don’t have “an” identity. I have many identities, and I like it that way.