Facebook blocks Google's Friend Connect

by Juan Carlos Peréz

May 15, 2008 —

The industry momentum for data portability brotherhood hit a bump on Thursday
when Facebook blocked Google's Friend Connect service from accessing Facebook
members' data.

Friend Connect violates Facebook's terms of service because it "redistributes
user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge,"
Facebook official Charlie Cheever wrote
on the company's blog for developers.

"Just as we've been forced to do for other applications that redistribute
data in a way users might not expect or understand, we've had to suspend Friend
Connect's access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance,"
Cheever wrote.

Facebook has already contacted Google "several times" about the issue
and is looking forward to finding a resolution, according to Cheever.

For its part, Google doesn't fully understand what it needs to do in order
to comply with Facebook's terms of service, said Google Engineering Director
David Glazer in a phone interview.

"We think users should be in control of their data. When we built Friend
Connect, we designed it very carefully to put users in control of their information
at every step of the way. We're disappointed that Facebook chose to disable
their users' ability to use Friend Connect with their Facebook friends,"
Glazer said.

Google shares Facebook's beliefs that users need to be in control of their
data and that their privacy needs to be respected. "I agree strongly with
the values they assert, and I believe the APIs they have released do a good
job of honoring those values. I don't understand at this point why they've chosen
to do something that doesn't align with those values," Glazer said.

Google held talks with Facebook before and after the announcement of Friend
Connect on Monday around the issue in question, and conversations are ongoing,
Glazer said.

Although Friend Connect is in a limited preview, there are four Web sites --
two built as demos and two real ones -- that had been accepting requests from
users to grab their Facebook profile data, Glazer said. That functionality is
now interrupted, he said.

Facebook didn't respond to a request for comment beyond Cheever's blog posting.

Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpace Data Availability are separate
initiatives announced in the past week designed to let people reuse the content
from their social network profiles in other sites.

The main idea behind this data portability concept is to save people from having
to reenter into multiple sites common profile information like their personal
interests, list of friends, photos, video clips, blog postings and the like.

However, none of the three initiatives even comes close to providing a broad
data portability solution, although MySpace, Google and Facebook have been commended
by industry observers for at least taking some first steps to address the issue.

It's not a secret that data portability itself is a complicated matter to solve
due to significant technical as well as commercial and operational challenges
that surround it.

Thursday's move by Facebook highlights just one of the considerable obstacles
for data portability: the different user-privacy policies and settings that
exist among social networks and online service providers. These policies and
settings need to be reconciled and harmonized in order for them to share and
accept user data from each other.

Friend
Connect is designed to let Web publishers add social-networking features
to their sites in a simple, straightforward way, by inserting "snippets"
of code, according to Google.

With Friend Connect, sites can add social features like user registration,
friends invitations and message posting, and allow visitors to interact with
their existing friends at social-networking sites like Google's Orkut, Plaxo,
Hi5 and, until recently, Facebook.

IDG News Service