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Quentin Hardy, 12.20.10, 12:00 AM ET

In case you hadn’t heard, Google is in a turf war with Facebook, and the turf is the Web itself. Google wants to keep the Web open and searchable so it can stick its ads everywhere. Facebook wants you on Facebook. The social network just launched its own communications service so you’ll never have to trouble yourself with Gmail or anyone else’s chat services. The tension between the two has resulted in open sparring the past few weeks over the exchange of personal data.

Google is ten times bigger than Facebook, except when it comes to display advertising. Google recently separated out for the first time its overall revenue for banner ads and the like: $2.5 billion a year (10% of its total revenue). Facebook is nipping at Google with $2 billion a year in display ad revenue. It leads all U.S. publishers with 23% of online display ad impressions, according to Comscore, and eats up a similar amount of the total time people spend online.

What does Google have to throw at this pesky rival? Microwave ovens. And tablet computers, GPS navigation devices and e-book readers. Into all of those electronic items Google is actively embedding its Android operating system. Android is already in 26% of smartphones (more than the iPhone OS) but is becoming a viable software choice for manufacturers to connect their gadgets to the open Web (read: not Facebook).

A coming version of Android called Gingerbread will have features geared to social networking through things like games and possibly access to people’s e-mail, phone or calendar (with permission). It will also support something called “near field communications,” which enables devices to read pricing or media information off chips costing 2 cents each.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt recently showed off an Android phone that could be used like a credit card, but similarly equipped devices could also pull up a movie trailer in proximity to a movie poster or act like a fast pass through a turnstile. “My guess is that there will be 500 new startups in the mobile payment space,” he said.

Privately, senior executives at Facebook worry more about the growth of Android than they do Google’s overt social endeavors, like the failed Google Wave communications platform or the Twitter-like Google Buzz (which doesn’t have much). The Android marketplace has expanded from 50,000 applications last May to about 100,000 now. Still, that’s only a third of the apps written for the iTunes store and one-fifth of the apps on Facebook’s platform.

Schmidt knows the platform is the key. He was chief scientist at Sun Microsystems and head of Novell, both of which were crushed by Microsoft’s dominant network of Windows developers. At Google Schmidt has used the Web’s openness to create an even bigger and harder-to-attack network of online developers who build software for products like Google Maps and now Android.

“It’s fundamentally about the mathematics of a platform,” Schmidt recently told an industry gathering. “You have to establish volume first.”

Failure is less of a problem if you can convince a few million outsiders to help.