First shot fired in the battle for social data standards
May 16th, 2008 by pierreloicLast week, we announced the battle for standards for social data among Google, Yahoo! and Facebook (btw, let’s shed a tear for Microsoft, absent from this short list. They’ll probably come up with their own standards in 6 months, stay tuned).
Yesterday, the first shots were fired in this battle with Facebook announcing they will block Google’s Friend Connect, in the name of protecting their users privacy against Friend Connect substandard privacy policy.
In their words, ” At Facebook, we always look out for the privacy of our users”. Really? Charles, I have one word for you: beacon.
Anyways, no reason to elaborate on this as this move by Facebook lacked all subtlety and there is barely a need to read between the lines to understand why they did what they did. Little scared of Google, aren’t we?
Just like in any battles for standards, we can expect more fighting before things settle down. The good news for all of us is that once this is all in motion, the momentum is very hard to stop and standards will undoubtedly start converging.
