Facebook Blocks Google’s Friend Connect Program
Posted on: Saturday, 24 May 2008, 18:10 CDT
Google Inc. continues to face challenges in their fight for a place in the social networking hierarchy behind no. 1 Myspace and second place Facebook.
Google’s Friend Connect allows the sites of musicians, political campaigns and others to incorporate profile data from several social networks. But just days after Friend Connect’s release, Facebook began blocking the program.
The popular social networking site claimed Google was violating Facebook's restrictions on data sharing, despite the fact that Google was taking advantage of the same tools that Facebook made available free to other outside developers.
In November, Google released a consortium called OpenSocial, which lets developers write applications for use on multiple social networks. So far Myspace has joined but Facebook has yet to follow.
This month, Google unveiled Friend Connect, a program that combines profile data from Facebook, Google Talk, Orkut, LinkedIn, Plaxo and hi5, though not MySpace. The profile information gets incorporated into other sites—a political campaign, for instance, can build communities of supporters by tapping existing networks—with Google serving as the intermediary.
Citing privacy concerns, Facebook chose to block the program. In the past, Facebook could always block a service it felt violated its rules when dealing with a company one on one, but with Google as the intermediary, Facebook lost that leverage.
“Google's Friend Connect redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge, which doesn't respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect,” said Facebook developer Charlie Cheever.
Google acknowledged that the program passes along data, but said it is limited to links for profile photos of users and friends who have expressly consented to sharing with that particular site. Google said the user's name and numeric ID on Facebook are replaced with Google's own identifiers.
The company also said it purges Facebook data from its systems every 30 minutes, more frequently than the 24 hours required by Facebook.
Privacy issues have been a problem for Facebook, most recently when it unveiled a marketing tool called "Beacon" that tracked purchases Facebook members made on other Web sites and sent alerts to their Facebook friends about the transactions.
“The dispute is ultimately about control rather than privacy,” said Rachel Happe, research manager at IDC. “Google's Friend Connect starts to eat into other people's value proposition, which is why you saw Facebook object to it.”
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Source: redOrbit staff and wire reports
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