Facebook and Google are yet to connect friends

A panel discussion occurred in San Francisco on Tuesday at Supernova 2008. Among the attendee were Facebook, Google and Plaxo who discussed various definitions of openness and ended up in the current controversy between Google and Facebook over their friend-connecting APIs.

On the point of who owns the social graph data, Kevin Marks of Google said

The point is that the individuals have shared custodianship of it because they have overlapping knowledge of each other’s connections.

The goal of OpenSocial (Google’s set of application programming interfaces for allowing applications to access a social graph) is to have an abstraction so the social contract can be enforced by the containers

A lot of people think that if Google violate the implicit social contract, it will disturb the fellow users.

Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr said:

Open is when users are mashing up things and in control. It’s driven by what is valuable to the user

Dave Morin of Facebook defined openness as providing people control over the information they share and providing developers with capability to build on top of the Facebook platform. Furthermore:

Social data breaks down into three categories, identity data, social graph data, and feeds and social actions. With 80 million users, Facebook has a responsibility to make sure that users understand what and how they are sharing information.

You should be able to take your identity wherever you go and keep social graph in sync.

He also said that the notion of dynamic privacy is at the Facebook’s openness efforts. Users can define privacy controls inside the Facebook in order to share more information and to be more open and have it always in sync, Morin explained.

In May 2008, Facebook blocked the Friend Connect service of Google saying that it violated its term of service. They elaborated the violation by saying that the service was redistributing user information (without letting them know), from Facebook to other developers.

When Facebook Connect initially launched and Google Friend Connect launched, both implemented different technology. We found Google to be in violation of our terms of service, so we asked to talk about it with them.

We are in direct contact with Google representatives to find ways to work together. It’s important that on this panel we are talking about this…It’s important that we figure out how to make it work together

Morin, when asked by Marks about what changes Google should make in Friend Connect to make it work for Facebook, said:

We would like to work together on how to make dynamic privacy happen for everyone, so every privacy setting on our site works on other sites.

Marks indirectly asked Morin the basis on which its service is blocked and Morin was imprecise on the issue. Google is using OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial in its Friend Connect implementation. Morin rather preferred not to talk on legal aspects.

Our representatives are talking so a fight on the panel doesn’t need to happen.

This indicates that the lawyers on both sides are running the show. Smarr, at occasion said:

We see each other all the time, and we are all in Silicon Valley, so there are overlapping back channels

Six Apart’s David Recordon, who has been involved in data portability efforts, said:

What Facebook is doing (with dynamic privacy) is very laudable–if you choose to share something in one place, it should appear in another. It’s just not clear on how this dynamic privacy will work. If Facebook tries to do it by themselves and not with other people, it will be hard to make it really scale