Want to sync your Facebook with Outlook?

Me too! Ah… wouldn’t that be nice? Having facebook syncing latest contact-info with outlook. Such a simple tool that would save me from calling wrong numbers and trying to get the spelling right for obscure email addresses that I need to manually copy. Not to mention having the info when I’m not connected to the net (yes, it has been known to happen).

Would you like that? I would! Of course facebook wouldn’t do it. Why would they? They want you to get into your facebook account to look for contact info (and see some stupid banners). An action that takes  you 10 times as much, but page-views growth is more important.

But now, all theses “Privacy advocates” will say “No way! You can’t sync my info! I gave it to you in an image format through facebook so it would be hard for you to copy it, not easy!!”. Oh.. thanks, really. That’s your idea of privacy.. making my life harder..

You GAVE it to me, didn’t you? If you give me your info – expect me to do stuff with it (and that includes sending you an email from GMail, and I heard that there are some services which log-in and scrape the information from it! Maybe not for long)

And a final note: Why do you think the email is an image and the phone isn’t? (yes, i know that email is more sensitive to spam, but isn’t the phone private info as well? why can’t facebook protect it the same way?)

My answer: They want to make it harder for you to use email as a communication method. They want you to use facebook messaging. They want your friend to log-in to facebook in order to be able to reply to you, and maybe he’ll stay for a bit longer, and see some ads..

At least they let Scoble back in..

Facebook – It is my data – not yours

Loren Feldman is so full of it. He basically says that Facebook is ok to block accessing it using a script, in response to Robert Scoble being banned… It is my data, since the people i know gave it to me!! If I want it in my outlook – it is my business! If I want it in my gmail – it’s my business! If I run a software or service that uses my data – it’s my business. The reason that facebook displays the data to me – is because they know i should have it. they just don’t want me to “really have it”, meaning – having it locally or being able to do something with it. ohh… for that, i’ll need to sit down and copy the infor for my 500 friends (which i do one by one, when i need to get someone’s most updated info. and it’s annoying to say the least!)

The spyware companies used the “it’s in terms of service” argument all the time! It’s a stupid argument.. So what if it’s in the terms of service – it doesn’t make it a good practice.

Facebook motivation is simple – they want to make life harder for the competition and they want people to develop Apps inside facebook and not outside – and they do all that on the expense of the user.

Update: Michael Arrington thinks they had it comming

Update2: Oh, and Plaxo – keep running your service, just make sure you run it slow enough and add some random pattern to it.

Google’s Alternative to Video Search

I’ve noticed an interesting pattern in Google’s video search strategy.

Video search is probably the most important video access method on the net (very much like any other media format). Google used to have video search right on the homepage beside “Images”.

Then, Google acquired YouTube and added it to the video search result. Later, they announced the Video-Site-Map format and started indexing other video services into the video search results (though it always seemed like results from YouTube showed up first, not to mention that you can preview only YouTube Videos from within the search results..). Later on, Google changed the page layout, but video was still #3 after web & image search.

However – something happened there…

For a while now, many people are using YouTube to search for videos, rather than Google.. maybe this trend started to change? It was obvious that searching for videos at Google provides more results from more video websites, including YouTube thanks to the widely adopted Video-Site-Map..

What happened next? Google took “Video” from the third place – to the last, hidden-behind-a-menu, 16th place!! (I’m not joking) and TechCrunch once demonstrated what this means.. – 1:3 of the traffic.

A few weeks later (days ago), Google added YouTube as a “Type” of search, right beside Video – as an alternative to Video search. (currently live on Google.com). Why would anyone need that if YouTube is already indexed in Video Search? to get less results? Pure YouTube? Shouldn’t that be done from YouTube.com?

YouTube is the only brand name in Google’s list of search types.

Will Google stay fateful to it’s promise to let users search the entire world’s information or would they prefer that users search in Google’s own services? ( thus, making sure that everyone submit content to Google’s services and not to the competition’s.)

Can’t YouTube compete fairly? It is a very Microsoft-ish move – very similar to bundling stuff to your market dominant OS. Is google going to start leveraging their search service to kill the competition in all the other services which rely on search for substantial amount of their traffic? Is it because Google Tips didn’t work for them, so they try something else?

Do no Evil? What’s next? It seems like Google is trying to become a Wikipedia as well. Maybe they’ll come up with an alternative to Blog Search: Blogger.com only search! (if you think about it – it makes the same sense..)

UPDATE: TechCrunch picked it up as well.