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There’s been a lot of buzz lately about what Apple and Google plan to do about the social web. While Apple recently launched iTunes Ping, Google has been acquiring social networking companies like the Rothschilds acquired the British Empire the the day after Waterloo. And while everyone wonders whether any of this will work out for either of Apple or Google, most of us are overlooking how both companies are greedily mapping out our real social networks and social graphs.

An Unwalled Social Network

My Real Friend List

Basically, both companies control vastly popular mobile platforms, and those platforms give them access to a much more tangible social graph than anything that Facebook has built out. As MG Siegler recently noted for TechCrunch, “the best indicator of who I actually interact with socially the most in real life are the calls I make and the texts I send — it’s all mobile interaction.”

This is why Facebook Places is so important: it gives Facebook a chance to remain relevant in the real, location-based world (and not become just one piece of an otherwise much larger suite of apps). And there are many ways in which in your Facebook (and other social media) apps can cross-tabulate your phone contacts with your online social networks.

But that doesn’t mean these social networks are safe. It just means they’ve bought themselves a bit more time.

A Networked Contact List

Okay, so right now my Android phone has my contact list. And then I download social media apps that interfaces with that contact lists, and helps me manage my multi-layered social life more efficiently.

But what if I didn’t need to download those apps? What if my phone offered all the functionality of Facebook (Twitter, Foursquare) right out of the box? And what if it wasn’t because these third-party apps were pre-installed?

You see, Apple or Google already has my phone. No matter what apps I use, they have my Tweets and my email and SMS and my contact list.

In a nutshell, they have all my data and content. So what is stopping them from integrating Tweet-like and location-based status updates the same way that Facebook did with its news feed and with Facebook Places?

What happens if social networking functions become standardized protocols just like email has, and all that still matters is the service provider and client you choose?

At that point, the Android (and just about any other mobile OS) would tap into your contact list to offer this functionality right out of the box, and Facebook would become just another storage bin for a specific niche social data the same way that Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail are for email right now. This, of course, wouldn’t mean that Facebook was completely dead in the water. But it would considerably limit the company’s potential and kill its status as media darling.

Basically, just like iTunes gives Apple an edge over Facebook and Google, Android and the iPhone give Google and Apple an edge over Facebook. They have my contact list first, so they augment my social reality more efficiently than many other third-party services.

Of course, Facebook might be developing its own OS, and that OS could turn out to be mobile or desktop or both. But for now, they’re still being middle-mannaged on their entire user-base on both accounts. And, if users still have to use someone else’s OS to run your apps, who really owns those users?