

Google points finger at Facebook hypocrisy, blocks Gmail import - yanw
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/google-points-finger-at-facebook-hypocrisy-blocks-gmail-import.ars

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jeffreymcmanus
Safe to say the cow is out of the barn here; if Google wanted to have an
impact they'd have done this two years ago. How many people in industrialized
countries don't yet have Facebook accounts? Like four?

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Seth_Kriticos
I guess I'm one of that four than. I had one briefly, but I never grew
sympathetic of them. I deleted it a few weeks later, Facebook is just too
creepy in their way of data handling.

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pat2man
I don't think you can actually delete a Facebook account. It still exists
somewhere...

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kang
Well u can, you have to contact them! See settings.

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pak
You have no way of verifying they've completely removed your data from their
servers. All you can tell is they no longer let anybody see it through the
website. They've publicly stated your data may be retained in "backups"
indefinitely.

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robryan
People tend to like Google to keep to standards that would only make sense as
a not for profit. Sure data portability is a good thing but when in specific
instances your helping your competitor without them giving up anything it
doesn't make sense.

I doubt shareholders would really want Google to sit back and give up the game
on social.

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rbarooah
People only hold Google to those standards because Google positions themselves
as a champion of openness and user's rights.

As you point out, these standards may not be entirely realistic for a for-
profit company operating in a very competitive space.

Google therefore must either take the risk that their standards will actually
make them into a stronger company, or gradually compromise them for
competitive advantage.

The problem with the compromise approach is that it undermines trust even more
than if they'd never held themselves to such high standards in the first
place, and that's where the backlash comes from.

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gord
It seems the 'introduce friends' feature should be an open standard - in the
same way hopefully OAuth2 will solve reciprocal login credential validation.

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patrickaljord
<http://portablecontacts.net/draft-spec.html>

~~~
gord
reference implementation ?

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chunkbot
I don't like Google putting artificial restrictions on what I can do with my
data.

But I also prefer permissive Apache/BSD/MIT licenses to GNU GPL, so maybe
that's just me.

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
AFAIK - This is not about the user. It's about other web services interfacing
with those APIs.

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DjDarkman
Facebook plays dirty and now they got a little dirt thrown back at them, and I
think they deserve it, because they are giving Microsoft the advantage by
integrating with Bing. I'm happy that there is search engine competition, but
not letting Google do the same is simply unfair.

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dman
So now its - "its okay to be evil to fight evil" ? I thought googles stance on
data portability was that its a good thing and that the users data basically
belongs to them. I would guess most users setting up an account at service bar
would be interested in importing their existing contacts / settings from
service foo that they already use.

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sandipc
I would say this is more of a Facebook limitation.

You can still export your Gmail contacts... just not to automatically to
Facebook (unless Facebook starts allowing easy export of its own data... which
is the bigger problem right now, IMO).

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dman
When google said in the past that users are free to take their data and leave,
I dont remember any caveats being in place. Whether they leave to join a
idyllic commune or a kleptocratic dictatorship imo their data should freely go
with them.

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known
Reminds me of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking>

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RtodaAV
I deleted my facebook account a long time ago.

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nspiegelberg
Where is that open-source MapReduce stack? Facebook even gives their HPHP,
Hadoop, and other code back to the community for free. The fact is, Facebook
cares about Data & Google cares about technology. Google has just perfected
making other companies look bad, while Facebook has the attitude of "let's
keep working on our features".

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modeless
Sorry, but if you're comparing open source contributions, Google wins by any
metric. Consider Chromium, V8, Android, WebM, GWT, Protocol buffers, the
Closure Javascript library+compiler+linter, and jillions of other projects
(<http://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:google>), not to mention the
tremendous support they've given Mozilla over the years, their work in
defining and promoting open standards like HTML5, plus indirect contributions
via the Google Summer of Code program.

~~~
kmavm
By "any metric"? How about, "lines of open source contributed per engineer-
year"? Google is 10 times larger than Facebook, and has been around for twice
as long. You would expect it to have a longer list of open source
contributions no matter what.

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axod
The original article isn't about open source. It's about data portability and
openness vs walled gardens.

Producing open source stuff is cool 'n all, but it doesn't really matter as
much as being open vs closed in terms of what you can do with your own data.

Personally, I don't particularly care if a company decides to be totally
closed source and not participate in open source contributions, as long as
they don't start putting up walled gardens and trying to lock in user data.

