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Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace To Google: Don't Be Evil
An anonymous reader writes "Over the weekend, Blake Ross, Facebook's product director and co-founder of Firefox, worked with Facebook engineers Tom Occhino and Marshall Roch to demonstrate how evil they think Google's newly launched Search plus Your World (SPYW) feature really is, and created a 'proof of concept' showing how it should really work. His team got some help from Twitter engineers and Myspace engineers, and consulted other social networks as well to really make sure the message hits home: SPYW should surface results from all social networks, not just Google+. By leveraging Google's own algorithms, the group built a bookmarklet called 'don't be evil' (a jab at Google's informal motto) and released it on a new website named Focus on the User."
..considering reports the Google's entire motivation for creating Google+ was that so much content was moving to social networks such as Facebook and that said social networks were pushing against Google's attempts to index the content on their services.
Seriously, they've been doing the exact same move with Facebook posts and the Like buttons with Bing for, what, two years now?
Furries make the internet go.
Facebook? Facebook is telling Google not to be evil? FACEBOOK? If Google were half as self-serving with privacy policies and use of data as Facebook has been....actually, it would be so awful I don't even know how to put it into words.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
It's just that they don't want to do it - they want more control for themselves and more information about users for advertising and marketing
So tell me, why Facebook data isn't open for everyone? That's control too, isn't it?. And do you remember when twitter said "no" to Google for use Twitter data on Google Social Search?
You should inform yourself before commenting, please.
Pot, kettle, Kettle, pot.
Am I the only one who wants to search for the words I type in and nothing else. Google is already giving some kind of preference for the results in my area whether I want it or not, and now apparently it is going to pollute them with more random junk. When I searched for a solution to a particular known problem with my car, it mixed in a bunch of completely irrelevant results just because they are to do with cars in my city. I guess no software company is immune to suicide by features phenomenon.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
new account, same anti-google? Jesus christ you guys multiply like tribbles.
The reality here is that putting this on google is focusing on a strawman to mislead people to the fact that it is facebook that prevents google from indexing it, not vice versa.
1) Their definition of "don't be evil" seems to be "please don't compete with us directly".
2) Facebook has already created the largest walled garden on the Internet by a couple orders of magnitude - maybe before trying to "fix" other companies' software *they* should start looking at ways to include other social networks and web sites without requiring a post/link into Facebook's database and a sneaky redirect...
3) Wait, Myspace has engineers?!?
Twitter to Google: "You can't search or index our content. You need to pay us millions of dollars to get a feed of our data"
Twitter to Media: "Google isn't searching and index our content! They're being evil!"
Give me a break. Twitter and Facebook put up walled gardens and prevented Google from crawling them, forcing Google to make their own social network and now that it's a threat, they pay PR firms to smear Google in the media and complain that they're not being included in new Google features. You want to be included? Set robots.txt to allow the googlebot to crawl your site.
Ya I was thinking the same thing. I read about some sort of deal between twitter and Google to use tweets in their search results but it fell through. So why is twitter bitching about it now? Google is running a business folks and they've done nothing wrong, by deciding to allow posts from their Google plus into the results.
Facebook telling someone how not to be evil? /. needs a comedy section. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I think the key change here is that, like SPYW, this form of Twitter integration might not be a panopticon of the whole Twitterverse; it would only integrate the "your world" part and you'd have to provide your login credentials to do so. (Anyway, think about that seriously: do you really want your search results clogged up with every Twitter post ever?)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
That's redundant because neither is private google+ data.
I think the landscape of the internet has changed too much, google is competing with facebook (google+), twitter (buzz, though it failed), and myspace (what competition, these guys still around??). Business 101 implies you do not offer your services to competitors. Google does have one big thing the rest don't, and that's a search engine, it kind of screws fb and twitter that they leverage it against them, but it's theirs to leverage.
At least google's learned their lesson and you have to "opt-in" to it. Facebook still randomly rolls features out.
I really don't like it (the Google+ Search).
I searched my name to see what came up, and my private from phone folder was across the top of the page.
I don't like the personalization of my search in this way, I don't want checking my email to bring up semi-private photos if my name is typed in.
I want google.com to search the web, not my profile, let me search my profile if that's what I want.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Sources or didn't happen.
What I recall was facebook declining access to google unless they payed shitloads of money (there was even a spat because they blocked google and then google blocked facebook access to gmail) and twitter wanting shitloads of money to grant access to their message stream.
They wanted to monetize their information so bad google thought it would be cheaper to launch their own social network... That's saying something.
Now that they kind of "succeeded", they cry.
Either way, no search engine should be giving social media results, but that's my personal opinion.
Oh hai, DCTech. New account for a new story you posted, right? Well, here's a quick summary of why Facebook and MySpace are full of crap, and Twitter is irrelevant:
* There's the standard complaint that links on top of the search results are an unfair promotion of Google's own data. Well, no shit sherlock. It's their own site, and they can show their own links whereever the hell they want. It's marked as not part of the search results, so I don't see how this could possibly be read as cooking the results. Unless, of course, you're Facebook and are trying to poison the debate.
* The focusontheuser.org page is also misleading in what it calls "on top of the search results". In the video, they clicked on the G+ link that specifically says "Here are the G+ results for your search", not on the general search results. Then they complain they get taken to the G+ page. I'm confused on how that was a surprise.
Essentially, what this is is a general bitch session by Facebook that Google shows Google products in the areas that are dedicated to Google products. Really? That's a problem? If Facebook is unhappy about how Google displays Facebook results, I have a suggestion for them: create your own search engine. Make it exactly as platform agnostic as it was shown on the focusontheuser.org site. Then go talk about Google doesn't offer the best possible search engine. In the meantime, this comes across as nothing but a giant astroturfing campaign by Facebook to force Google to show Facebook and Twitter results in an area that Google has set aside for its own products.
That said, there are some interesting ideas in there on how Google can improve its search:
* default opt-out for showing my G+ info. I know when to look for it, thanks.
* In the left sidebar, include a social network section. Filter specifically on known social networks. Have it even be customizable to only show results from a user-defined list of social networks.
But that's it. There's absolutely no need to have FB and Twitter results show up in the right side-bar, which is explicitly dedicated to Google product results. Not unless you want to essentially force Google to advertise Facebook and Twitter results for free.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Cognratulations, you demonstrated that Google - gasp - has access to publicly available information on Twitter and Facebook. The only thing you've done is rearranged where the results appear. What exactly was the point of this exercise? To prove that Google does not have a filter for social networks? Congratulations. The easy solution is to have that filter appear where all the other filters are: in the right left sidebar, among images, news, etc.
I'm wondering what kind of crap reason Facebook will come up with next if Google actually goes that route. Because Facebook's problem isn't that Google doesn't index the results properly, but that Google has a nice platform from which to advertise its own products. Kinda like how Facebook has a nice platform from where to advertise Facebook products.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
In my opinion this demonstrates perfectly that it's entirely possible for Google. It's just that they don't want to do it
...and in other news, McDonalds doesn't want to sell Burger King's hamburgers, despite the fact that it's entirely possible for them to do so. A Burger King spokesman decried this blatant favoritism as "evil".
You've got to ask yourself at the end of the day: how much do I really care about this?
Seriously, who actually uses google to find fb and twitter posts when those sites have their own search?
This is about $, not ethics, in the sense of fb and twitter and myspace wanting to make more with google's good will this time. Sounds more like a jest / proof of ethics than an actual feature request.
So, what, you want to restrict how discoverable information is to the recipients after you've actively shared the infromation with them?
If you don't want to share anything publicly, don't share anything publicly. Then it doesn't matter if someone adds you to their circles, because they won't see your posts and there's nothing to influence their search results. If you choose to share something publicly, is it a problem if people can find that information when they search for it? If so, why are you sharing it publicly?
Why should Google pay for the privilege of promoting Twitter and Facebook?
oh, I'm not against using social network data to rank searches, what I'm against is getting people involved.
google has been crawling my e-mails for data, or even tracking my interests for ages, and as long as I was user #124517851 that's fine. Names make it way too personal and creepy.
So you're saying Google's missing out on opportunity to invade on your privacy with the data FB wants to sell them?
By evil...do they mean - don't steal personal information and use it to make profits, and don't change security processes without letting the users choose, and don't force users to opt-out of privacy feature "enhancements" in the effort to protect their personal information, and certainly don't call things "privacy enhancements" when the enhancement is actually a way to make more profits from other people's private information. If memory serves me...when I signed up to Google+, I was asked up front and directly during the sign up process whether I would allow Google to use my personal information to target advertisement while using the site. To me...that is the exact opposite of evil. I think Mark Suckerberg needs to wake up from this dream he is in.
Keywords for the NSA overthrow oppressive regime true believers marathon Manhatten the financial district blueprints I
They aren't paying for the privilege of promoting Twitter and Facebook, they're paying for the privilege of accessing them to use them search rating valutations.. They do it already, but in limited scope. When site is mentioned in Facebook or Twitter (now only publicly), it affects their rankings. They use them as metric. Likewise they can use it for targeting advertising.
So the only way for Google to not be evil is to pay Facebook and Twitter lots of money "for access to their data." Please pardon my tiny violin here. If Google were filtering out Facebook, that would be one thing. Refusing to cough up extortion money or payola is another. Sounds like Google is doing nothing unethical here. And if you think that Google is making a poor business decision, then encourage someone else -- Bing or Yahoo for example -- to do it and eat Google's lunch in the process. Until then...
Try feeding Facebook pages through Google Translate as I did recently trying to follow up a foreign news story. You will find that Facebook does a considerable load of blocking to make life difficult for Google. We also know that Twitter wants to charge for access to the data. This whole story is attempting to blame Google for the evil that Facebook and Twitter have done to themselves.
It's really funny the way that there's this big campaign recently by several companies which are obviously evil (Microsoft, Facebook etc.) against Google. I'm guessing that they are afraid that if someone started insisting that more companies weren't evil they would lose their competitive edge?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
I'm guessing it's the "paid to not understand" part as there has been a new bout of desperation represented by new usernames lately which all cater to the anti-google, pro microsoft, pro facebook concept and somehow think that the average slashdotter (who is a techie) is going to be unaware that they're all funded by the same group. They also first post articles and think people won't notice the sockpuppetry. Comedy, at best.