Online social networking etiquette is hard enough for people. Now it seems that online social networks need an etiquette guide for interacting with each other.
Search engine Google has started up a new service called Friend Connect. It basically allows smaller sites to set up their own online social networks that pull profile data like contact info and friendships from existing online networks like Facebook, MySpace, et al. Today Facebook has said it won’t allow Google to use their members data in this way.
Facebook explained why on their blog….
“We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our terms of service.” via Facebook Developers
Hardcore internet purists freak out at anything that goes against the free and open philosophies that the web was founded upon. But others have already said it was the correct thing for Facebook to do.
Users don’t care about this stuff. They just want to interact with their friends on a site where all their friends are also users.
I don’t really care either. Though, if I was Google I would totally write “You Suck!” on Facebook’s wall.