Google opens Android front in Zuckerberg data war
Google has opened up yet another front in its longstanding war with Facebook over who gets to know who your friends are, updating its Nexus S Android phone so that the handset's contacts application no longer dovetails with Mark Zuckerberg's social networking behemoth.
Mountain View is still unhappy with Facebook's refusal to offer API access to user "friends lists". In November, Google cut Facebook's line to Gmail's contacts API and said it wouldn't restore the connection until Facebook introduced a similar API. Facebook, well, hasn't. So, in another effort to loosen Facebook's hold on the so-called "social graph", Google has tweaked the Nexus S contacts app.
Originally, the app let you display contacts stored with Google alongside your Facebook friends data, including friends' phone numbers and email addresses. But it didn't actually transfer the data from the social network - Facebook doesn't, er, offer a contacts API - and this wasn't a setup Google could live with. In an over-the-air update to the Nexus S - the "lead" Android phone, carrying software controlled solely by Google - the company has removed the app's ability to play nicely with Facebook.
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