51–60 of 175 posts
Neither is doing this for the users. They are doing it to help their services grow and ultimately to help their bottom line grow. Believing anything else would be naive at this point.
Google is being silly. First because they're breaking the usability of THEIR own site out of an invented vendetta against a company that is just using the feature they created and made available. If they don't believe people should be able to export data from Gmail they should stop offering it generally and compete against other email providers with a more closed platform, not whine about reciprocity from sites that…
Facebook has, I assume, the ability to discern me from an app, and so easily could give me a way to export my friends contact information made visible to me while simultaneously not giving it to Farmville.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google is trying to monopolize your relationships (i.e. they give you an option while advising which option you should take), while pointing out that Facebook is monopolizing your relationships. They're taking different paths to reach the same end.
Agreed, but at least on google you can export your data.
It seems to me that their wording pushes their anti Facebook data locking agenda, intimidating novice users. To me, this goes against their "don't be evil" company motto.
To me it embodies their "don't be evil" company motto. I think Facebook is being evil here, and Google is fighting the good cause. However, I can see your angle as well. It seems that the world is not black and white after all :(
edit: added "and nowhere else (which is a key point)"
"I recognize that once it’s been imported to another service, that service may not allow me to export it back out." I could see how this could scare the average user into thinking their contacts are moved from Google to facebook and stuck there, thus loosing their ability to use them within Google's products. Do you think this is the intention?
Google is so engineering-oriented, I can't tell if this was an honest, poor choice of wording or intentionally vague for the purpose of inducing fear. I'm not against the warning if it's in the spirit of educating users about how to keep their data "free", but if this is indeed vendetta as others here are suggesting...well, that's Google's prerogative, but this method would seem a bit unprofessional. If they want to attack Facebook, I'd have more respect if they were explicit about it in this warning.
The warning says: "Here’s the not-so-fine print. You have been directed to this page from a site that doesn’t allow you to re-export your data to other services, essentially locking up your contact data about your friends." I think this is misleading - Doesn't Facebook allow you to download all of your data, just like Google? As much as I dislike Facebook's privacy policies, the mudslinging seems a little thick from…
Facebook to my knowledge does not let you export your friends email addresses in a way that they could be synced with your email service. I think that if they did, it would be beneficial to everyone. Their claim that email addresses are private is bogus. They could add buttons to the privacy settings that would allow a user to block their email from being access by friends. There is no valid, as in non anti competiti…
I ask because FB messaging, like Gmail, is already available on the two platforms that matter today - web browsers and smartphones. Yeah, you need a FB account to use FB messaging, but if you don't have Facebook, you're not a real person, at least according to Quora (along with any other FB-connect only site). (Quora has since backpedaled on that stance.)
The obvious interoperability move - letting you reply-by-email to FB messages is something they'll never do, because it means you don't have to sign into FB, which they can't have.
This is such bullshit. A service that won't let me "get my contact information out"? Nice way to frame this in terms of "openness" too, apparently riding "open" for all it's worth with Android is not enough. Can I just "get out" all of my personal information from Google? No? Isn't Google "open" enough to let me do it? We think this is an important thing for you to know before you import your data there. Did you also…
Mostly yes. http://www.dataliberation.org/