Google retaliates: Blocks Facebook from importing Google’s data!

The world’s premier search engine has responded to the world’s largest social network. Google has retaliated to Facebook’s siphoning of Google contacts and bringing them on to Facebook. Facebook has unveiled a feature on its site which allows Facebook users to find friends on Orkut and Google Contacts and bring them on to Facebook or link to them if they are already present.

This is a death knell to Orkut, at least in India. Orkut which has a considerable lead over other social networks like iBibo, Twitter, BharatStudent and LinkedIn in India, is trailing Facebook. With this import feature many of the users, like me, might never go back to Orkut. Google has realized this albeit a little late. Now it has blocked all third party API’s to automatically import Google contacts or sniff through any of its services subscribers.

In a statement, Google said websites such as Facebook “leave users in a data dead end.”

“If people do search within Facebook, if they do email within Facebook, if they do instant messaging within Facebook, all of these will chip away at Google’s properties.” (Reuters)

Facebook is hitting where it hurts Google the most. It is slowly moving on to Google’s turf of search and could probably morph itself into a social search company. With half a billion users already in the database there is data and petabytes of it. Making that data searchable and finding patterns on that data is a valuable business. For example: The break-up patterns are being detected based on the status updates on Facebook. There is more. Social networks can predict the mood of stock markets. Facebook is not letting go of that data and that is @#!*% Google off.

Google which has been an Internet darling for a good decade has got some ground to catch up on. Facebook has already started the decade on a strong note. Can Google really retaliate?

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