{"id":7092,"date":"2010-11-05T22:27:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-05T22:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=7092"},"modified":"2024-01-14T20:00:40","modified_gmt":"2024-01-14T20:00:40","slug":"nice-move-google-what-took-you-so-long","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2010\/11\/05\/nice-move-google-what-took-you-so-long\/","title":{"rendered":"Nice Move, Google — What Took You So Long?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In a move that is being interpreted by many as a cannon shot across Facebook’s bow, Google has changed the terms of service on its API<\/a> — the programming interface that developers use to do things like pulling your contacts from Gmail, etc. The meaning of the change is simple: third-party apps and services can’t pull data automatically from Google without allowing Google to do the same with their data. Think of it as a declaration of data reciprocity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Depending on how you feel about Google and its vast reach, quasi-monopolistic status, etc. this move is going to seem like a) an attempt to impose Google’s vision of how the Internet should operate on helpless little companies, or b) a laudable attempt to force openness on companies — such as Facebook — who might otherwise want to keep your data locked down within a walled garden (this is clearly the view that Google itself has<\/a>, not surprisingly). I lean towards the second of those viewpoints. Too many services want to be a roach motel for your data: they will let it in, and make use of it for their own purposes, but they don’t want to make it easy for you to take it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Facebook is a classic example. It’s obvious that the company sees the user data that it collects, whether it is email addresses or click patterns or connections between users — i.e., the “social graph” — as the core of what it has to offer both users (in terms of recommendations, etc.) and advertisers. But it sure doesn’t make it easy for you to get all of your information and activity back out of the Facebook universe. Yes, you can now download some of your content<\/a>, including photos and wall posts, but you can’t download the email addresses and other info of your contacts and so it is not true data portability<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is an argument that this data doesn’t exactly belong to you — in other words, that Facebook might be criticized for letting you download<\/a> all your friends’ email and contact info. So why is it okay for Facebook to have it, but not the person who created those connections? It’s interesting that one of the factors that kept Apple from allowing the automatic import of Facebook contacts into Ping, according to comments from Steve Jobs, was that the company’s terms for making use of this kind of data were “too onerous.” Facebook seems to see its control over that data as giving it a pretty big bargaining chip when it comes to dealing with other services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To me, the contact info of my friends is *my* social graph — not Facebook’s social graph or Google’s social graph. I should be able to take it wherever I wish. My only criticism of Google’s move is that it has taken way too long. The issue of data openness and data portability with respect to Facebook arguably first blew up over two years ago, when Robert Scoble got in trouble for trying to scrape his personal info<\/a>. Why has it taken ** for Google to make such an obvious change to its API rules? In that time period, Facebook has gone from something like ** million users to over half a billion, and that kind of influence is going to make it easier for the company to just ignore the whole data portability issue.<\/p>\n

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In a move that is being interpreted by many as a cannon shot across Facebook’s bow, Google has changed the terms of service on its API — the programming interface that developers use to do things like pulling your contacts from Gmail, etc. The meaning of the change is simple: third-party apps and services can’t … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Nice Move, Google — What Took You So Long?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gigaom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7092"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258309,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7092\/revisions\/258309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}