According to TheRegister:
Google is now telling anyone stupid enough to import Gmail contacts into Facebook to reconsider such a foolish move because it’s a “trap”.
The two companies have been angrily shaking handbags at each other over the past few days in a public protest over who has the best data mine on the interwebs.
My personal opinion is both companies are like a bunch of kids trying to disturb each other in the “dinner” table of the world wide web.
Facebook does brings lot’s of referral traffic to websites due to the very nature of sharing links, images, videos and more while Google dominated the search results that brings relevant contents when in doubt.
Both are almost as essential as the other hence there should be no competition here however, there MAYBE some other social networks or search engines that have better algorithm for serving information that we all desired creeping out in the surface while the giants fights each other.
Blekko started off quietly recently with innovative slash tag socially influenced search engine!!
blekko: how to slash the web from blekko on Vimeo.
There is also a brand new social network based web browser based on chrome engine call “Rockmelt“. (cool!!)
While Facebook is facing more privacy concern and too much peer pressure types of “friends of friends” snooping & advertising.
There is always twitter & other social networking will pop out to quickly replace facebook within a short period of time.
To me, social network can change over time as long as I loses control of my social network, I will slowly reduce activities in that site and post only simple links instead of using it extensively as communication tool.
However, if I have full control of my social network privacy & no peer pressure of adding more strangers that my friends know….it will be a much better social network.
Google Buzz & Wave fail because the problem of email integration, it’s something like pulling all the email addresses (including boss, colleagues, gaming buddies, movie buddies, prospective companies HR guys that you send resume to, family members and millions of spammers) into a single social network.
That constitute a severe breach of privacy violation which immediately cause a uproar and dumped by almost everyone.
While I still love google Gmail and Google doc and some of google products but email contacts are as private as mobile numbers and it’s should remain private & confidential.
All social network should use USERNAME instead of email as public identification so that no strangers can spam you with useless jokes & want to give me millions of dollars that I had won in some phantom lottery.
While email is only for registration only not to crawl for contacts to add automatically into the social network.
Recently, iPhone app Kik Messenger did that and had to publicly apologize to the violation of our privacy.
In a couple of years into the future, we might be laughing at this article about facebook vs google, just like we laugh at AltaVista vs friendsters now.
Hopefully both companies can focus in designing new innovative ways to improve on the user experiences instead of fighting each other.
Let’s there be peace! :D