Google Inc.’s online communities have little traction in the
United States, but the search leader continues to seek a spot in the
social-networking hierarchy.
First, it must contend with Facebook, the No. 2 online hangout behind MySpace.
Days
after Google unveiled Friend Connect, which lets the sites of
musicians, political campaigns and others incorporate profile data from
several social networks, Facebook began to block the program.
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Although
Google was taking advantage of the same tools that Facebook made
available free to other outside developers, Facebook said Google was
violating Facebook’s restrictions on data sharing. The two sides remain
in a stalemate.
Google, whose Orkut social network has tens of
millions of users in Brazil, tried to reach further into social
networking with the November unveiling of a consortium called
OpenSocial, which lets developers write applications for use on
multiple social networks. News Corp.’s MySpace has joined, but Facebook
hasn’t.
This month, Google unveiled Friend Connect, which
promises to pool 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.
Facebook
quickly objected, citing privacy concerns. Normally dealing with other
companies one on one, Facebook can block a service it feels violates
its rules. With Google as the intermediary, Facebook lost that
leverage, so it decided to block Friend Connect entirely.
In a
blog posting, Facebook developer Charlie Cheever said 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.”
Google responded,
acknowledging it passes along data. But it said sharing is limited to
links for profile photos of users and friends who have expressly
consented to sharing with that particular site. The user’s name and
numeric ID on Facebook are replaced with Google’s own identifiers,
Google said in a company blog post.
Google also said it purges
Facebook data from its systems every 30 minutes, more frequently than
the 24 hours required by Facebook.
Facebook has run into privacy
challenges before, 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.
But Rachel Happe, research manager at IDC, said the
dispute is ultimately about control rather than privacy. She said
Google’s Friend Connect ”starts to eat into other people’s value
proposition, which is why you saw Facebook object to it.”