It will give a very interesting insight to further digest this case, but it needs to be done openly and scientifically …

Do they really need a reason other than Google sucks, plays dirty, and shouldn’t be allowed to capitalize freely on Facebook’s hard work?

Of course you can keep pushing Google for your own profit under some half-assed guise, but then you’re a known twat.

Friends Connect is 4) and looks like an entry level container that widens the market for widgets by vastly increasing the number of places your widgets will run. They’ve managed to hide all the complexity of building a container or installing and integrating ShinDig into one line of javascript. Isn’t that an amazingly clever thing that will have at least as much effect as wrapping Google Maps into a snippet of javascript that anyone can use?

Now the first few widgets available on this hosted platform are from Google and in there is an OpenID Signin, and a Friends viewer. And also in there is a Facebook application. And it’s this Facebook application that is calling Facebook’s bluff.

Either Facebook’s Connect API let’s you use Facebook’s auth and gives you access to your friends. Or not. And on the surface the answer is “Yes, as long as we like you”. But even this isn’t clear. FB appear to be saying that you can get and store ID numbers, but you can only display your contacts’ data on the fly.

Which finally brings us down to a privacy debate that is central to the whole data portability drive as it relates to your list of friends. You have a claim on your own profile data. You have a claim on your list of friends. But you *don’t* have a claim on your friend’s profile data. And in that context Facebook looks like it’s trying to do the right thing while also using it as a core part of their business model. Google is also trying to do the right thing from the public access point of view. Actually your friend’s profile data is public information. And public information wants to be free.