Facebook Blocks Its Rivals’ Access To Social Graph
Social media giant Facebook has changed its Platform Policies, denying Twitter’s Vine application and Yandex’s new Wonder service access to it’s social graph.In an explanatory post on the Facebook Developer Blog, Platform Partnerships and Operations Director Justin Osofsky, explains that the changes will only affect “apps that are using Facebook to either replicate [its] functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook”.
Wonder, a voice controlled iOS app launched in the US by Russia’s equivalent to Google, Yandex, is a combination of Apple’s Siri and Facebook’s Graph Search, available on a mobile platform.
Users ask Wonder questions like “What music do my friends listen to?”, “What coffee shops have my friends been to in London?” and “What countries have my friends been to in Asia?”. Wonder then uses information from other social networks to answer.
Wonder’s similarities to Graph search put it it direct competition with Facebook, hence violating the new conditions of Facebook’s Platform Policies.
The section of Facebook’s Platform Policies that has been changed used to look like this:
Competing social networks: (a) You may not use Facebook Platform to export user data into a competing social network without our permission; (b) Apps on Facebook may not integrate, link to, promote, distribute, or redirect to any app on any other competing social network.Now it says this:
Reciprocity and Replicating core functionality: (a) Reciprocity: Facebook Platform enables developers to build personalized, social experiences via the Graph API and related APIs. If you use any Facebook APIs to build personalized or social experiences, you must also enable people to easily share their experiences back with people on Facebook. (b) Replicating core functionality: You may not use Facebook Platform to promote, or to export user data to, a product or service that replicates a core Facebook product or service without our permission.Vine, Twitter’s new video sharing service, has been blocked partly due to Facebook’s on-going battle for supremacy with Twitter. Mostly, however, Facebook are wary of Vine’s potential to do for video sharing what Instagram did for photo sharing.
Now that Instagram is Facebook-owned, in would not be unreasonable to presume that Facebook’s engineers are currently developing their own instant video sharing update to Instagram in order to compete with Twitter and Vine.
The changes to Facebook’s platform policies will not affect the majority of social app developers:
“For the vast majority of developers building social apps and games, keep doing what you’re doing,” says Osofsky. “Our goal is to provide a platform that gives people an easy way to login to your apps, create personalized and social experiences, and easily share what they’re doing in your apps with people on Facebook. This is how our platform has been used by the most popular categories of apps, such as games, music, fitness, news and general lifestyle apps.”
What do you think of the continuing struggle for supremacy between Facebook and Twitter? Are they in danger of aggravating their users?
Contact us on Twitter or leave your comments below.
Will Sigsworth
Follow us @SocialMediaF & @WillAtSMF
www.socialmediafrontiers.com
Facebook Blocks Its Rivals’ Access To Social Graph
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