Google Challenges Facebook Over User Address Books 120
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 (Score:1, Insightful)
About time for someone to challange Facebook
Facebook invites ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You can't have their email address (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You can't have their email address (Score:1, Insightful)
Ok, but many people do have their email address displayed on facebook. You can have your email addresses displayed to friends/networks.
Why not allow the exporting of those email addresses that can be seen by that user?
Re:Facebook invites ? (Score:3, Insightful)
And you validate that the address facebook now has on record is real, legit, and interested in privacy.
If you ignore, filter, and/or delete the message, they really can't confirm.
Just follow the same procedure you use for SPAM/UCE
Re:You can't have their email address (Score:4, Insightful)
NEVER let spammers know the address is legit. (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Facebook invites ? (Score:3, Insightful)
That is assuming you are signed up for facebook. Given his stance on the issue, I think it's safe to say that mystik does not use facebook.
Prisoner's dilemma (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Facebook search sucks (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:You can't have their email address (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lead to Walls? That's FUD! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:NEVER let spammers know the address is legit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the e-mails that social network sites send are not unsolicited but sent by request from and on behalf of a real person who already has and has verified your e-mail address.
Re:You can't have their email address (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the day (2004-2006), when Facebook was only for college students, email addresses on Facebook used to be mailto: links. Since crossing the collegiate network boundaries was more difficult than it is now (Facebook hadn't eroded basic privacy that far yet), having a person's email was a surefire way to make sure you found who you were looking for.
Once Facebook opened up to non-college students, I believe emails displayed on Facebook actually became images to harden them from harvesting by spam bots. This was before "granular" privacy controls, and so anyone who was your "friend" on Facebook could see your basic information, of which your email was a part.
Once Facebook was forced to introduce stricter/"easier" privacy controls, a user could restrict, on an per-individual basis, who could see their email(s). As a result, emails became text.
In regards to allowing exporting other users' information, I think Facebook would face a huge backlash from users and "game" developers, for different, though obvious reasons. However, the biggest reason this won't happen is because Facebook's goal is to hoard users' information by providing low barriers to entry and high barriers to exit.
Re:You can't have their email address (Score:4, Insightful)