Will the real Michael Arrington please stand up when it comes to Google vs. Facebook? I’m confused. Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington seems to be saying that Facebook is wrong to suck up data from Google’s contact systems, especially after Google has tried to block Facebook from doing that. In another post on November 5 he even seems to be saying that Facebook should open up its data hoarde and let everyone have access. So why am I confused? Because Mike and I have had only one really violent argument. I’ve always thought that Facebook should have opened up and should allow users to take contact info to other systems. Why did that argument happen? On Gillmor Gang a few months after that event, Mike and I had it out in a shouting match. Only I thought that we should ALWAYS be able to move email addresses and names back and forth between these systems without any restrictions.
Only I have been consistent. But, now, let’s discuss this. What’s funny is that Facebook IS making moves to open up. Yes, Facebook still forbids email addresses to go elsewhere. The problem? And. Give Us Our Data, Facebook. I usually give Facebook the benefit of the doubt in its various wars with the press and users, particularly around privacy issues. Mostly because user expectations around privacy are changing in real time. Things that were reprehensible just a couple of years ago are now considered so mainstream that even Salesforce will buy them and no one blinks. So when Facebook redefines privacy to remove actual privacy, I take a wait and see approach. I’ve taken the same approach on data portability. For a good two years we’ve all been waiting for Facebook to let our data out. They’ve done so in drips and drabs, but the crown jewels – user emails – remain locked up.
In 2008 Robert Scoble was actually banned from Facebook for using a Plaxo script that extracted friends’ email addresses. At the time I sided with Facebook. Well, that’s all changed now. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. It’s the right thing to do. Facebook is too important. Facebook is lying. The data export tool red herring. Small window of opportunity. Who's Right & Who's Wrong? A week ago, Google made changes to its Terms of Service that effectively blocked Facebook from importing a user's data from Google without offering reciprocity. Ever since, the two companies have duked it out in public, with public statements, comments on blog posts and even a warning that Facebook would "trap" your data. We spoke with a few members of the data portability community to see what they had to say about the debate between these two big companies and what it means for the rest of us.
It's a Game of Strategy Eve Maler (aka XMLgrrl), host of the User-Managed Access group among other things, started off by reminding us that "Facebook's end-users are not its customers; they're the product. " While Google's relationship to its end-users is much the same, she said, "it has developed a strategic stance on privacy and data portability that accepts and promotes greater user control of the personal data it sees, and this allows Google to capture the high ground in this debate. " The Facebook-Google spat over who controls your data. Mark Zuckerberg's favorite phrase is "social graph. " In nearly every public appearance, the Facebook founder describes his company as a kind of cartographer on an endless mission to build an ever larger, more comprehensive, and more accurate map of humanity. A social graph is a digitized map of connections between people in the real world—the lines that connect you to your friends, your friends to their friends, and on and on until we're all ultimately joined to Kevin Bacon.
At the moment, no corporation has a more comprehensive graph of these connections than Facebook, a fact that will surely bring the social network insane profits. Yet before Facebook, there was another way that people mapped their world online. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people around the world join Facebook. Facebook didn't invent the practice of mining data from one social network in order to build another. This week, Facebook's one-way philosophy erupted into an ugly spat with its frenemy Google. It's about timing. Back in February we wrote about Facebook’s secret Project Titan — a web-based email client that we hear is unofficially referred to internally as its “Gmail killer”. Now we’ve heard from sources that this is indeed what’s coming on Monday during Facebook’s special event, alongside personal @facebook.com email addresses for users.
This isn’t a big surprise — the event invites Facebook sent out hinted strongly that the news would have something to do with its Inbox, sparking plenty of speculation that the event could be related to Titan. Our understanding is that this is more than just a UI refresh for Facebook’s existing messaging service with POP access tacked on. Rather, Facebook is building a full-fledged webmail client, and while it may only be in early stages come its launch Monday, there’s a huge amount of potential here. Facebook has the world’s most popular photos product, the most popular events product, and soon will have a very popular local deals product as well.