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Google Challenges Facebook Over User Address Books
jcombel writes "When you sign in to Facebook, you had the option of importing your email contacts, to 'friend' them all on the social network. Importing the other way — easily copying your Facebook contacts to Gmail — required jumping through considerable copy/paste hoops or third-party scripts. Google said enough is enough, and they're no longer helping sites that don't allow two-way contact merging. The stated intention is standing their ground to persuade other sites into allowing users to have control of where their data goes — but will this just lead to more sites putting up 'data walls?'"
About time for someone to challange Facebook
The problem is that importing Facebook "friends" to gmail requires you to get access to their email address. Friends are in quotes, because Facebook friendship is more like shallow aquantances than friendship. Most of those people you don't want to share your email address with. It is a different thing entirely when people voluntarily give out their email addresses by signing up for Facebook apps, but in this case the email sharing would happen involuntarily.
Football Odds
Good , now also block those annoying facebook invite emails and I'm a happy camper
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
awesome. fuck facebook for not giving the option to export contact lists with useful information. I had to pull a list of e-mails from facebook and I ended up going page by page and copying the e-mails by hand. facebook wants to hold all e-mails within it's walled garden and doesn't reciprocate...
I think it would be fair that most community-built sites lower their data walls. Not just facebook, but also, e.g., Amazon, and IMdb, which have huge collections of user-reviews, and let's not forget youtube.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Google search sucks too for special characters ][/;:@#%éçà*, etc
but will this just lead to more sites putting up 'data walls?'"
And that's a bad thing why?
Is it a good thing that one site can "one click" harvest large amounts of information about a person, and all the people they have ever met online?
That doesn't sound very "opt-in" to me.
For instance: if I'm one of the people in someone else's "collected addresses" address book (say, someone I bought something from on E-bay 2 years ago, and they didn't even realise my e-mail was automatically saved in their address book).
I don't want Facebook Et al. having easy access thank you.
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"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
The problem is that importing Facebook "friends" to gmail requires you to get access to their email address. Friends are in quotes, because Facebook friendship is more like shallow aquantances than friendship. Most of those people you don't want to share your email address with. It is a different thing entirely when people voluntarily give out their email addresses by signing up for Facebook apps, but in this case the email sharing would happen involuntarily.
The email address is already visible in the info tab of the profile. This discussion is solely about whether a user can export all friends email addresses (that he can already see) *automatically*.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
It's a good practice to never "opt-out" for other spam, since it indicates that the address is indeed valid and used. So why should Facebook or any other social media site be treated any differently?
Not true. André gives me very different results from Andre.
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The two way communication works decently over Android phones, at least as much as I use it.
I'm not sure if that's a good thing, or not. I tend to favor it most of the time.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Facebook promotes all this semantic tagging of the web, trying to convince webmasters to use their (broken) RDFa standard OpenGraph so they can parse and extract all the info from other websites, yet they don't implement anything like it themselves. They're an information black hole, and other websites should be so willing to just give everything up without any reciprocity.
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All search engines suck right now. Most of the time you get nothing but spam. Especially when looking for drivers, and especially XP drivers.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Facebook wants to take without sharing. If it were a 5 year old kid, they're be forced to share or quit playing with the other kids. It's that simple. Google is actually moving to create an atmosphere of sharing data easily if the user wants to. Facebook's the one with the wall already, and Google's singing Pink Floyd, "tear down the wall!" and I've read multiple stories in the news this week about how this is a bad thing. Can you say FUD?
I always skip any step that either prompts me to supply login info for another service or that will harvest other peoples emails through me. If I send an email to you should I expect it to be in face books db if you join facebook? Never liked that...
Isn't this basically the Prisoner's dilemma? Both Google and Facebook stand to gain by allowing users to share their hundreds of millions of contacts. It may be a slanted version of the prisoner's dilemma since Facebook has nearly twice as many as Google, but Facebook still probably stands to gain millions of users per year from Google and they are not in direct competition with one another, since a lot of people use both Facebook and Google.
Turning the other cheek is typically a bad thing to do in these situations. Facebook does not want to play ball. Google is right to strike back.
Windows XP sucks for not including a proper driver distribution system.
But yeah, search engines suck too. Showing results from 2006 when the user is clearly searching for technology information is not particularly clever. And it's not just tech searches. Google's supposedly clever system has still not noticed that I click the "show results from last year" option in about 95% of my searches. You'd think it would enable stuff by default after a while for logged-in users.
First off a disclaimer, I hate FB. It's a black hole of denigrating interpersonal unity cycles where everyone eventually acts 13. Yes, it's an over generalization. Yes, FB is incredibly useful in some ways. I've heard the arguments but I digress. Anyway, can't CSV copy/paste work just fine with minimal effort in this case? I understand the broader picture here but even that can be defeated by a few minutes of work. How often is this function utilized person to person anyway for those few extra minutes to even add up to a substantial amount? I would waste more time on /.idle than on those few steps. a 3 step 'For dummies' approach could be used to disseminate the 'technique' to laymen. Though laymen is prolly a misuse here.
curious for thoughts and tangents on this.
Possibly (hint: summarize the event, put your comments/questions in a normal posting, not in the summary)
regardless of your stretch of a definition for fud,
Google is singing "tear down the wall," by building a wall. we've been living in an environment of corporate self-protection lately; do you think this tactic will work, and convince Facebook "Oh, wow, I should open up here!"
Or is it more likely that other sites will follow suit and prevent their users from easily getting in bed with other websites?
Let's consider a few things
a) you don't want spam
b) you don't want your email address being used to identify you **anywhere** that you do not specifically allow.
Question 1:
- Why would you email anyone with a gmail account?
Question 2:
- Why would you want anyone to enter your email address into facebook (or any other "social media app/website" at all?
When I provide you with my email, it is for your personal use, not the use of google, or facebook or LinkedIn or whatever other ad-based tool you use because you are too lazy to care.
Go away.
Does Google accept OpenID from all providers yet? For years now, they have provided you with an OpenID, but didn't accept an OpenID from 3rd parties. They are just now starting to allow certain providers in (big ones like Yahoo).
Especially around Facebook.
I'll give up Facebook before I give up GMail.
I think anyone out there who has Half Life'd will understand.
Facebook is so keen on having us use this feature so they get all of our email contacts as well, that it frequently show "suggestions" on the right hand side telling you that some of your friends have used the facebook friend finder feature... and the best thing is that in several cases it is an outright lie! I have asked my contacts if they had really used that, and several told me they had not, including a few security geeks who I trust are telling the truth (you know, people with papers published on social networks privacy flaws).
There's a word for that you know.
Oh yes we do, your on slashdot:
So, you ain't dating anybody, and you spend last night re-compiling the kernel, then crying yourself to sleep in your cold lonely apartment. Only comforted by the hum of your computers.
Or is that just me?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I have been receiving very odd spam messages from people who have been on my MSN messenger list that contains just a link which redirects to a pill site domain (which doesn't load, I assume it is one of those brute force exploit pages). The from field on the email address is their display name on Facebook. I have received it from 3 people, 1 of which is a friend on Facebook, all of them are on my MSN contact list. One person on facebook swears I even sent him one, and I am pretty darn sure I am not infected with anything. Has anyone else been receiving them?
The only good corporations and businesses are those terrified of their customers, the minute the corps think they have the upper hand you get something like AT&T, horrible service, over priced, poorly managed and you have to sign their contract which they can change at any time.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
In the end, they'll agree to share information. Odds are, Google is going to have to pay Facebook or give them a cut of ad revenue from ads targeted using the social networking information gained from Facebook. Can't say I have a problem with Facebook wanting cash, assuming that's part of the issue - they have information Google wants, Google ought to pay for the privilege. They already make enough money off serving ads while indexing other people's websites. At least the Facebook users know they're posting or uploading information to Facebook.
The question about how Facebook users feel about such a deal is a different issue - and one they should be concerned about. Given the option. I'd block Google from seeing details on Facebook and vice-versa.
More walls makes it harder for random companies to harvest my information. Identity theft is already stupidly easy to do, why make it easier?
Friends are in quotes, because Facebook friendship is more like shallow aquantances than friendship.
Uh, maybe for you? The only people I'm friends with on Facebook are people I know pretty well- people I've met, intend to meet again, and either am good friends with, or intend to get to be better friends. I've declined a number of friend requests from people I barely knew. And since I've looked at my friend's profiles on a regular basis, I can see all their email addresses. A number of them also have phone numbers and IM accounts visible; I do to all the people I've friended, because I want them to be able to get in touch.
I wish there was a term for the behavior I've seen for years on Slashdot, namely: assuming that because something has a certain level of utility or function for you, that it must be that way for everyone else. I've lost track of how many times someone has said "Oh, this technology is stupid, I can't _____________", and they don't even realize that they're not the target audience or that others might have a different use, experience, etc.
Please help metamoderate.
Yes, because there's nothing starting an initiative of mutually beneficial and required openness to isolate projects and to put up walls.
That's the reason why the GPL failed to ever gain traction, you know?
Google was making it easy for developers of other companies like facebook to import the gmail info, and not getting the same kindness in return, good for them, they should also change up the format so all the info in the past given out, would need to be revalidated thereby forcing all companies who want to import the gmail info to renew that trust and offer their code / help also for importing contacts etc...