SOA.WRK.

A dialog: Facebook and Google discussing Friend Connect

There are so much discussions on this issue. However, the most interesting exchange I found is the dialog between Facebook and Google published on their blog sites. In an announcement posted in Facebook developers blog, Charlie Cheever said the reason for blocking Google Friend Connect is:

"We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, ... is a violation of our Terms of Service."

This weekend, Google responded in a blog posted on Google Code blog, How Google Friend Connect Works. In the blog, Peter Chane, Sami Shalabi, and Mussie Shore provides a step-by-step example of how Friend Connect work with Facebook data. It explains that the only data redistributed is the URL of user public Facebook photo with user consent:

"3) The only user information that we pass from Facebook to third-party applications is the URL of the user's public photo."

This is a very interesting dialog between them. Will Facebook continue this dialog with a new blog next week?

Posted at 07:50PM May 18, 2008 by tientienli in Personal  |