Google Vs Facebook
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
1st slap from Google
The war between Google and Facebook is heating up: Google just made one small tweak to its Terms of Service that will have a big impact on the world’s biggest social network. From now on, any service that accesses Google’s Contacts API — which makes it easy to import your list of friends’ and coworkers’ email addresses into another service — will need to offer reciprocity. Facebook doesn’t, so it’s going to lose access to this key piece of the social graph. So what does that mean in layman’s terms?
Our post earlier tonight about Google shutting down Facebook’s access to Gmail data exports makes me think two things. First, I’m not sure there’s much data that Facebook doesn’t already have with its 600 million users (although 1.3 billion people visit Google sites a week, so they’re not exactly slumming). And second, the data protectionist era has now begun in earnest. Trade restrictions, tariffs, etc., called protectionism , is always a double edged sword. It has the short term benefit of helping domestic companies stay competitive and profitable, and that also protects jobs.
Data Protectionism Begins In Earnest
War Of Words On “Openness”
By Geoffrey A. Fowler What happens when a 6-year-old and a 12-year-old get in a fight?That huge sucking sound you hear is Facebook, piling data from third parties into its mouth as fast as it can while it remains stubbornly greedy about releasing its own data to anyone it doesn’t like. Which is mostly Google these days, since Yahoo and AOL completely surrendered and Microsoft actually owns part of them. Google shut them down last week, restricting API access and effectively blocking contacts exports to Facebook in any automated way. This is, I wrote, the true beginning of data protectionism . Now Facebook has found a way around that restriction. They’re leveraging a Google feature that lets users download their own data for their own use – part of Google’s golf-clap worthy data liberation effort.
FB Strikes Back
Google's 2nd slap
Yesterday Facebook released a clever way to continue to download Google user data, despite Google banning Facebook from using their APIs. It looks to me like they aren’t going to try to stop Facebook from using this more manual approach. Instead, for now, it’s being escalated only via words: We’re disappointed that Facebook didn’t invest their time in making it possible for their users to get their contacts out of Facebook.
Comment of a FB Engineer
Yesterday Facebook released a clever way to continue to download Google user data, despite Google banning Facebook from using their APIs. It looks to me like they aren’t going to try to stop Facebook from using this more manual approach. Instead, for now, it’s being escalated only via words: We’re disappointed that Facebook didn’t invest their time in making it possible for their users to get their contacts out of Facebook. As passionate believers that people should be able to control the data they create, we will continue to allow our users to export their Google contacts. That’s a nice swipe there in the beginning, about how they wish Facebook had spent time giving people a way to liberate their own Facebook data rather than building tools to end run around Google.
If you hadn't yet heard, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle this past week over your data by two Internet giants - Facebook and Google . It started when Google began blocking other services from importing its data without reciprocity, a move aimed directly at Facebook.
It's a trap !
A day after announcing the new Facebook Messages , Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today. Here is a look at some of the key points brought up during tonight’s discussion. On Facebook Messages If you missed yesterday’s announcement , but caught today’s, you’ll be happy to know that Zuckerberg recycled his speech and anecdotes from yesterday when questioned about what Facebook Messages was and what he hopes it will do. If you missed both, Zuckerberg talked to the audience about how his girlfriend’s sister, who is in high school, complained that she and her friends didn’t really use email even though they had accounts. When pressed for why, she exclaimed that it was too slow.
Zuck: "not sure 100% right"
Facebook Removing Gmail From List Of 3rd Party Email Providers
Something is up on the Facebook vs. Google data reciprocity front . It looks like Facebook is removing Gmail from the list of third party email providers on “Find Friends” , whereas we were seeing direct link downloads to Gmail contacts still offered as an option just a couple of days ago. It gets stranger.
This is an intervention
Hi Google, hey Facebook, sit yourselves down. I need to have a word with you both. You see, it’s not escaped our notice that you’ve both had a bit of a fall-out over the past few weeks, and quite frankly it’s getting silly. Google, you started the spat by blocking Facebook users from searching their Gmail accounts to find friends. Your reason for this? Because Facebook doesn’t allow users to do the same thing, find users on other services by searching their Facebook account.Analysis