Much has been said over the last few months about the competition brewing between Facebook & Google. Wired Magazine even ran a story on the topic and framed it as a race over the future of the internet. And the blogosphere became even more heated up about this subject last month when Facebook acquired FriendFeed in an effort to strengthen their position within the emerging real-time web.

But with all that’s been said about the competition, its interesting to see that there are actually times when Facebook and Google collaborate behind the scenes. One recent example is the unexpected exclusion of FriendFeed subscriber counts from FeedBurner analytics (a feature that rolled out in June). It sounds minor, but a blog that reported 10,000 RSS-feed subscribers last week woke up this morning to find that number 20-30% lower. We at TrendSlate also noticed that our RSS subscribers decreased, even though our overall traffic has grown by 3-4x. Bloggers were immediately voicing their concern over the issue on Twitter, and several “Google vs. Facebook” conspiracy theories began to grow.

Checking Google’s Feedburner blog this evening, it seems that they are aware of the issue and have worked with FriendFeed to resolve it:

Issue: We are working with FriendFeed to determine why subscriber totals from this service are not available in the most recent daily subscriber counts reported for FeedBurner feeds. We will update this post with any status changes and resolution.

Updated: We have resolved the issue with FriendFeed, and you should see updated stats from FriendFeed in the 24 hours after your feed is polled by FriendFeed.

Its good to see Google & Facebook engineers working together to solve this collaboratively. It makes you wonder about the interconnected tech community in areas like Silicon Valley, and how relationships between these developers manifest themselves to create great results throughout the product-development process.

FriendFeed Unique Visitors courtesy of Compete.com