Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2010; it reports news about the dispute over Facebook importing Gmail contacts. Google Buzz was shut down in 2011, and Hotmail and Messenger have since been replaced.
As we all know, Google and Facebook have been engaged in a tug of war for some time. Both want to dominate the internet market across all their services.
Even so, last month they reached an agreement, in keeping with the famous saying “if you can’t beat them, join them”. The truth is that, as things stand, neither can bring the other down, so they entered into a negotiation in which, as of today, Facebook seems to have tried to be too clever and Google has now got annoyed.
Facebook is the only internet company that doesn’t share its user data with other services, and yet it has got Hotmail, Yahoo and practically every instant messaging and social networking company to hand over their users’ data without any reciprocity.
To avoid any misunderstanding, by sharing data I mean that when you open a Facebook account, the program gives you the option of searching for contacts from your Messenger or Yahoo account, which means that for a moment Facebook has had access to your contacts and password.
Google, on the other hand, was resisting letting Facebook access data from Buzz and Gmail, so if you wanted to add a user to the social network, you had to invite them personally.
According to TechCrunch, people in charge at Facebook and Google held several meetings, and in the end Google agreed on one condition: if Facebook could search for users in Gmail and Buzz, Google wanted the same access, making it a reciprocal collaboration between the two internet giants.
Apparently, at a later meeting they broke off the deal, because Facebook wondered why it should reach an agreement when its engineers could hack the system to offer that feature. And that’s what happened.
In the United States, the Facebook social network was able to access Gmail users for two weeks, until Google found a way to break that connection. Right now, although Facebook shows the icon for adding users from Google accounts, the connection breaks as soon as the process starts.
Google thinks Facebook has been too clever by half, to the point that tempers between the two are rising, and in time they could end up in court.
Could Lars Rasmussen have helped find a way to access Google’s data without its consent?
In the end, our friend Mark Zuckerberg will turn out to be exactly as he’s portrayed in the Facebook movie: a greedy, cheating, ambitious person, capable of selling his own grandmother to get something.
Further reading
- Facebook to be investigated for violating its users’ privacy
- Google, Facebook and Twitter: who will win?
Featured image: Coolcaesar at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
