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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?'"
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...
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?
and let's not forget youtube.
A quick google search would have found: http://www.dataliberation.org/google/youtube-1 .
Not true. André gives me very different results from Andre.
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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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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?
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).
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).
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.