The arrival of the Google+ social network has caused a battle to erupt over ownership of Facebook users’ contact information, and on Wednesday open source provider Open-Xchange fought back against Facebook’s earlier deactivation of its OX.IO export tool.
“We simply added a new API key to the export tool,” wrote Open-Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna in a Wednesday post on the company’s blog. “Facebook could continue with their ‘smart’ strategy and deactivate the new API key again. Do we think they will? I doubt that Facebook wants to continue their slow public suicide.”
The tool is available on Open-Xchange’s OX.IO site; instructions for using it are provided in an earlier blog post from last week.
A Million Users Per Day
The OX.IO tool is an extension to the Social OX feature on Open-Xchange’s namesake open source platform that uses the official APIs from various social and business networks–including Facebook–to create an exportable address book that can then be used however the user pleases.
Importing that data into Google+ is one example.
Prior to deactivating Open-Xchange’s OX.IO tool, Facebook did the same thing to the Facebook Friend Exporter Chrome extension as well. Though neither tool was designed exclusively for Google+, the growing popularity of the new social network evidently caused Facebook to sit up and take notice of what has surely been a spike in activity.
Indeed, it looks like Google+ has been gaining roughly a million users per day since its launch, putting it well on track to hit 20 million users by week’s end.
No wonder Facebook is sweating.
Overriding Users
This is a high-stakes battle, and users need to pay close attention.
I’ve never been a fan of privacy-challenged Facebook, but what’s especially breathtaking about these latest actions are that it won’t let anything tap a user’s friend list, even if the user has given permission to do so.
It’s trying to claim ownership of users’ contacts, in other words.
Facebook has gotten a lot of flak over the years for its privacy violations, and rightfully so. But for all those who needed a clear signal of its intentions, this is it.
Facebook isn’t interested in your best interests; it’s interested in owning and controlling your information. Looks like it’s about time to jump on the open source lifeboat and get the heck out of there.