Sudden Disconnect Over Social Networking Deal

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has argued that his Web site makes human relationships more "efficient."

Sure, he said in a speech last year, two friends "can communicate offline if one of them picks up the phone to call the other, or if they take some time to hang out, or if they randomly bump into each other. But these methods are all synchronous -- they're kind of inefficient. In order for them to work, both people have to be paying attention to each another at the same time.

"There's a better way to do this; and on Facebook, it's simple. These people can read each other's profiles any time they want to see new information about each other. They can look at each other's media, and they can send each other messages. On Facebook these real connections become more efficient. People get more value out of all their relationships."

Even so, exactly how people will share their information across the Web, and which companies will benefit from it, remains uncertain, as the standoff between Google and Facebook suggests.

Until Facebook's withdrawal, Google's Friend Connect would have allowed Facebook members to visit other Web sites using the service and, while there, tap into their Facebook friends list and other social information. To protect privacy, users would use their Facebook username and password to access their information. That, Google officials explained, is how 'Friend Connect' would make the Web "more social."

But shortly after the launch, Facebook officials asserted that Google hadn't briefed them on Friend Connect. And having seen the service, they said, they discovered that it violated user privacy by passing user information to third parties.

"We had not had a chance to review how it worked before it launched," Facebook's chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, said in an interview last week. But he declined to detail the company's privacy concerns.

Google quickly offered an alternate version of the Facebook deadlock.

Glazer said that Facebook had been fully briefed on Friend Connect.

"We talked to them before the announcement, we talked to them after, and there was a person from Facebook at the launch," he said.

Moreover, he noted, the only Facebook information that Friend Connect gives to a third-party site is the person's public Facebook photograph, and that is done only after a user has logged in with his or her Facebook credentials.

Some observers suspect that Facebook cited "privacy concerns" as an excuse for pulling out of an agreement they had come to view as a competitive threat -- they were concerned about their users leaving the "walled garden."

"What Facebook is after really is control over their users," said Chris Saad, co-founder of DataPortability.org that advocates for standards for sharing information.

Though Facebook has moved toward opening their walled garden, Saad said that from a financial standpoint, the company "has a difficult balancing act to perform."

On one hand, they'd like to keep users on the Facebook site. On the other, users are demanding the ability to utilize their Facebook contacts when they are elsewhere on the Web.

Saad, Glazer, Lunn and others argue that ultimately, the barriers of the walled gardens, like Facebook, will come down.

That, Glazer said, will leave the current social network sites "needing to evolve."