After all the hype surrounding Google Friend Connect and the implications of a much more integrated social media space, Facebook have pretty much thrown it straight back at Google by blocking Friend Connect from the API.

“Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.”

There is more detail on the Facebook developer blog; I for one am shocked and rather enthusiastic about how Facebook are playing this, it seems after the beacon fiasco they have finally learnt that users are concerned about privacy and waking up in some Orwellian nightmare.

It does seem rather late for this approach though; with services out there already in existence that have the same functionality in a browser extension or toolbar such as Minggl or the one recently released by 97th floor.

My feeling is that there will be some sort of agreement between Google and Facebook at some point... it’s still early days for Friend Connect and they both have too much to lose by not integrating.

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