[h=1]Google To Facebook: You Can't Import Our User Data Without Reciprocity[/h]
JASON KINCAID
The war between Google and Facebook is heating up: Google just made one small tweak to its Terms of Service that will have a big impact on the world’s biggest social network. From now on, any service that accesses Google’s Contacts API — which makes it easy to import your list of friends’ and coworkers’ email addresses into another service — will need to offer reciprocity. Facebook doesn’t, so it’s going to lose access to this key piece of the social graph.
So what does that mean in layman’s terms? When you initially sign up for Facebook, you’re run through a series of prompts asking you to enter your Google account information so that Facebook can import the email addresses of your contacts. This is a very powerful feature because it helps new users instantly connect with dozens of their friends. And Google is turning it off, because it thinks Facebook isn’t playing fair.
You see, Facebook has never allowed users to export the contact information of their friends. This has been a gripe against the social network for years, because there’s never been an easy way to pick up and leave Facebook with your own data in tow. But what, you say? Didn’t Facebook
just launch a new feature that lets you download your information?
Yes and no. The feature lets you download content you’ve uploaded — photos, wall posts, videos, events, and messages. But the export feature leaves out the most valuable set of data: your contacts. Yes, Facebook will give you a list of their names, but it doesn’t attach any contact information: you don’t get their email address, phone numbers, or anything else another service could use to rebuild your social graph somewhere else.
Well there you have it!!! Not gonna work anymore