Google and Facebook are starting to square up against one another after the former tweaked its Terms of Service which will definitely impact on the world’s biggest social network in a big way. From now on, any service which accesses Google’s Contacts API (essentially making it a snap to import your list of friends’ and coworkers’ email addresses into another service) will have to offer a similar level of reciprocity – something that Facebook doesn’t do at the moment, so it is definitely going to lose a whole lot of access considering the number of Google users there are out there. According to Google (image courtesy of Gizmodo):
“We have decided to change our approach slightly to reflect the fact that users often aren’t aware that once they have imported their contacts into sites like Facebook they are effectively trapped. Google users will still be free to export their contacts from our products to their computers in an open, machine-readable format–and once they have done that they can then import those contacts into any service they choose. However, we will no longer allow websites to automate the import of users’ Google Contacts (via our API) unless they allow similar export to other sites.”
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