Google has been battling Apple in the smart phone space for just over two years. Now they are batting Facebook, but not in the mobile phone space. Nope. Their battle with Facebook is about accessing data. Earlier this month Google broke Facebook’s ability to dip into your GMail Contacts and see if you have contacts who you have not listed on Facebook by changing their Terms of Service.
My problem with this is that Google is trying to tell me that the Rolodex belongs to them and I can not use it as I wish. The last time I checked this was not the case. If Google was going to go to the extent of banning Facebook from allowing me to enter my Gmail login info into Facebook and have Facebook automate the process of checking of finding out if I have Contacts who are not my “friends” on Facebook then why are they still allowing me to export that information to a CSV file? Answer that one Google.
They dont have a good answer to that in Mountain View, CA. If they did have a good answer the would most likely remove my ability to export that information. Google’s reason for blocking the Facebook import tool is simply that they are “trapping” their users. Last time I checked Facebook announced a data export tool earlier this month that allows users to export all of their Facebook data (https://register.facebook.com/download/?h=9b971be877490d1b6288bff0d4ac4ac7) if they choose to and a user can delete their account anytime they want. Yes their account is deactivated for 14 days prior to being permanently deleted but this is normal, back in the day, and even still today, some email providers did not actually delete your account for a certain period of time (usually 60 days) in the case you decided to come back. In the end, I think it was very pointless for Google to pull this random cat out of a hat and ban the Facebook import tool because all it did was lead to Facebook offering a tool to upload your CSV downloaded from Gmail to see if you have contacts who you do not have listed on Facebook.