Facebook Vs Google: Mike Vernal Says Google Aren’t Open

As some of you probably already know, Google and Facebook are having a little tiff between them regarding user data. The most recent little retaliation in the fight has been Google’s decision to block Facebook completely from access to the Gmail contacts API. Now Facebook has decided to have their own say, by being a little mean to Google via comment threads on TechCrunch (which I’m sure they loved getting).

Facebook Platform Engineer Mike Vernal posted a comment on this TechCrunch article in response to Google’s actions. Vernal made comments such as “Openness doesn’t mean anything when it is convenient to you” and references a comment from Eric Schmidt which says “How do you be big without being evil? We don't trap end users. So if you don't like Google, if for whatever reason we do a bad job for you, we make it easy for you to move to our competitor.” He also claims that Facebook policies have “been consistent”, which is very much untrue.

Vernal ends the comment with “We strongly hope that Google turns back on their API and doesn't come up with yet another excuse to prevent their users from leaving Google products to use ones they like better instead”. Hmm not very subtle there are you Facebook?

Whether you are on Facebooks side, Google’s side, or neither side most users would probably agree that their petty fight is not really doing anyone any favours and it is going to only be the Facebook and Google users that get truly annoyed by their actions in the end.

Via: Electric Pig, TechCrunch