Who would have thought the current slugfest between the world’s first- and second-placed websites would be over a point of principle. Well, that’s the official version.
Recently Google took the unusual move of refusing to let its users’ export their contact books en masse to Facebook, citing data protection issues as the main reason. According to Google, their ‘don’t be evil’ ethos extends to data protection in the form of ensuring the portability of information as well as transparency in how it is used. To simplify: any users should be able to treat the contact book like a passport, usable solely by the owner, and cannot be retained by any other party.
Google has since relaxed its policy replacing an outright ban with a warning page explaining what may happen to personal data after handing it over to a third party.
It might look anti-competitive, but Google’s stance is not without merit. Facebook makes a point of holding on to the e-mail addresses you furnish it with and you have no control over how the information you hand over is used. The only way to remove your account completely is to go through a series of steps neatly tucked away in the account settings.
Should anyone want an example of how information can be (ab)used for marketing purposes, look no further than the company’s first big marketing experiment: Beacon. Under Beacon users shared information on recent purchases on their profile Walls, without specifying the wish to do so. Not everyone wants to know their friends’ latest purchases on Amazon, and indeed said friends might not want to publicise a love for, say, Judy Bloom novels in their mid-30s.
Criticised as an unacceptable violation of privacy, Beacon was shut down in 2009 after two years. If the exercise proved anything it was that account holders were happy to give over personal information to third party application developers, but didn’t like when information was fed back into the public domain. As Google trucked along with a successful revenue model in AdWords (worth $23 billion annually), Facebook has struggled to find a way to leverage its massive population.
That may be about to change as Facebook gets ready to introduce its own messaging system which, if successful, could divert users away from Google and them in the social network’s maze-like ecosystem based on dialogue and casual games. It’s a battle for the hearts, minds, eyeballs and attention spans of millions of users worldwide – the more users you hang on to the more appealing you become to advertisers, especially if you can develop more reliable ways to reach target markets. And, thanks to a user base not bothered by handing over their e-mail addresses, they have the raw material to it.
Payoff?
So how does Facebook intend to take a chunk out of Google’s AdWord pie? The fine details of the new Facebook service, and timetable for roll-out, remain vague. The broad strokes are that Facebook will integrate e-mail from multiple sources, introduce a dedicated @facebook.com address and aggregate instant messages and text messages into single conversation strings.
Instead of dividing up messages by subject or strings correspondence across all media get amalgamated into single feeds – much the same as they appear on profile Walls. It’s hardly revolutionary stuff, if anything it sounds like users could end up with a lot of noise for little payoff. With Google services are already easily imported into open cross-platform instant messaging clients like Pidgin and productivity suites like Microsoft Office, it’s hard to see anything terribly new, exciting or convenient beyond not having to log out of Facebook – but for some that might be reason enough to use it.
You’d think users would applaud Google’s stance on what is effectively an exercise in data harvesting for keyword analysis purposes, but Facebook n00bs have actively sought a workaround of downloading a copy of their address book as a .csv file then uploading to Facebook from their desktops. It’s hard to argue for a principle when users actively circumvent the measures put in place to protect them.
The best way to look at Facebook’s messaging service is to consider it not so much as a ‘convenience’ but as a weapon for wrestling users’ attention away from search on an open Internet (a Web 1.0 paradigm) to dialogue in a walled garden (Web 2.0).
Will users care about any of this marketing guff? Probably not, but they can’t say they weren’t warned. It’s all in the terms and conditions.
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