Micheal Arrington (TechCrunch) and Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) are both men whose opinion I highly value. Yesterday, these two gentlemen clashed big time on Gilmor Gang podcast over the issue weather Facebook was wrong to block Google Friend Connect.Now why did Facebook block Friend Connect in the first place? "We've found that [Friend Connect] 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," say Charlie Cheever in his post to the Facebook blog. This still doesn't really the answer to what Google wants to do different.
To clarify the issue I will borrow from Scoble's post on this. The information we have on a Social network can be broken down into:
1. Social graph (basically your affiliations)
2. Friends’ info (all the things they would input into their profile - email address, gender, etc.)
3. Actual data (photos, videos, status updates, and wall posts)
While Google Friend Connect is an attempt make 1 and 2 available Facebook believes that only 1 should be shared because of privacy reasons. While Arrington believes that only 1 should be shared very much like Facebook, Scoble believes that 1 and 2 should be shared.
My own opinion is that 1 and 2 should be shared. I want to have all my friends aggregated in one place but also want their information. It would solve problems like remembering the birthday of ALL your friends (not only the ones on Facebook). It could also be the foundation of an excellent address book solution. One of the biggest problems for me as a user is having a comprehensive address book. I have friends that I for instance mainly communicate over Facebook with (although I can see their email address in their profile) and some that I just email with. When I want to write my Facebook friends an email I have to go into my account find their email address and paste it into my email client. Wouldn’t it be great to have all your friends email addresses and other relevant information on one page (that ideally allows you to email them from there). I think yes.
So come on Facebook and Google, be friends!
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