Facebook and their meteoric rise to the lofty realm of social network kingpins have decided to opt-out of Google’s Friend Connect, a program that would allow users from different social networks to aggregate their info on different sites across the web.

Facebook users are expressing anger, and the problem was stated quite thoughtfully by Techcrunch’s Steve Gillmor: “If Facebook insists on freezing our data as a condition of using their service, the company is essentially recommending we go elsewhere.”

Facebook’s argument is that Friend Connect “redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.”

But doesn’t Facebook own their data? Didn’t they work hard to build up a popular service and a large user base? Why should they just give it all up for virtually nothing? What do they get out of it? It’s a question that is worth asking.

Another question worth asking is if people really care that much about Friend Connect. Right now, nobody beyond hardcore geeks really care, and perhaps Facebook is smart to be cautious and see how big Friend Connect becomes before diving in.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 1:46 pmand is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.