My ex-boss, John Furrier, You can see him at the end of the event where I shoved my cell phone in his face and tried to get him to comment. He refused.
After the camera is off he said it was “interesting” that Google had used Facebook as one of the examples during its launch of Friend Connect.
I guess it was a lot more than “interesting.”
They blocked Google because they didn’t want Google to populate its friend network with data collected from Facebook.
Oh, I know, that’s not the real reason Here’s the official statement from Facebook
Facebook is being consistent here. Dave Morin told me a few months ago all about Facebook’s concerns. Such as, what happens if you change your email address, will it change everywhere that your email address got copied to? Clearly with Google’s Friend Connect the answer is “no.” Why? Because it was a one-time action and there was no live connection back to Facebook and Google’s Friend Connect’s data would get older and older (and more and more out of date). Want to delete your email address off of the Web? Sorry, thanks to other systems Facebook can’t ensure that’ll happen. Now, I’ve been on both sides of this story. A few months ago I tried using some unreleased technology from Plaxo to do exactly what Google did on Monday night. I not only got kicked off of the API (which is what should have happened) but my account was hidden and I was locked out for about 20 hours. Facebook’s “penalty” for that behavior was way too harsh. And, some, like John Furrier, believe that Facebook is on the wrong side of the line tonight again. Me? I think Facebook has a point, but I think the horse is out of the barn already and Facebook won’t be able to shove it back in. Why? You should check into He was convicted of sending child pornography through email to someone else. If email isn’t a private medium then surely Facebook isn’t. (The person he was emailing those photos to emailed them to the authorities). What do you think? Does Facebook have a point or is the horse already out of the barn? UPDATE: over on TechCrunch thinks I’m wrong on this post. But, if you read the comments over on his blog you’ll see we’re not that far apart.
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