Facebook cuts off friend data from 'competing' startup Voxer | Hacker News Reader

Facebook cuts off friend data from 'competing' startup Voxer

venturebeat.com

33 pointsscapbi11 comments

When a company feels its user is using its data for commercial purposes and has shown some threats to its business, the company would restrict the access to its APIs and/or services. Names that I can recall now are Apple, LinkedIn, FB, MS, and Google.

The irony is no matter how nice a company plans (or fakes) to be, business rationale usually triumphs all other things. Do no evil anyone? ;)

yeep. which is why you should never bet your business on the good will of another, because it runs out eventually.

"Facebook later told TechCrunch that it won’t give access to data to any company that doesn’t share much back". Is that documented anywhere? I never heard about usage restrictions based on sharing. This is going to get a of lot startups worried...

I'm pretty sure I've seen this restriction discussed on HN before, especially around the time g+ was introduced. I think they ran into this well, but I'm not sure what the resolution was.

IIRC This was Google's rationale in disallowing FB from importing contacts programmaticaly - FB wants to hoover contacts from everywhere but refuses to give data back.

Correct. That is pretty much exact reproduction of Google's statement when they cut off Facebook access to Gmail contacts. The irony.

This is going to get a of lot startups worried

I find it really silly that a startup wouldn't be worried to begin with. Think about this for a second: building a network effect is extremely hard. Extremely hard = lots of time = lots of money. All of the sudden, a company (like Facebook) is giving away access to their massive identity database away FOR FREE. Let me rephrase, they are giving away something they've spent massive amounts of money to create for free.

If someone can't compute that, then I feel no sympathy for your startup that goes tits up.

s/Facebook/Google/ and you have the contacts import debacle of a couple years ago.

I'd say the over/under for a clone of Voxer from FB is 6 months. I'm taking the under

I imagine soon, Facebook will want to support those suffering from the inability to connect in as easy of a way - due to Voxer's uncompromising ways..

Try -16 days:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/3/3832250/facebook-messenger-...

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