The Social Network Wars Begin In Earnest: Facebook Bans Google Friend Connect

Facebook is all about openness and data portability, as long as that doesn’t involve openness or portability of data, it seems. Today they wrote a long 7 paragraph blog post to get a single point across: Facebook has banned Google’s Friend Connect access to the Facebook API:

"Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the
technology. We’ve found that it 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. Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that
redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to
suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into
compliance. We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope
to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where
they choose."

This of course has nothing to do with the fact that Facebook launched their own nearly identically named product called Facebook Connect three days before Google’s Friend Connect. It’s not clear exactly what features of Friend Connect justified the ban, since it is so similar to what Facebook announced on Friday. Both products allow the export of profile and friend list data to third party websites.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/15/the-social-network-wars-begin-in-earnest-facebook-bans-google-friend-connect/