San Francisco – In a surprising turn of events over the weekend, social network colossus Facebook Inc is clearly appearing aggressive in implementing its policies and is giving no data love to Yandex, a Russian search engine that released a mobile application, Wonder, that was something like Facebook’s graph search mixed with Siri.
Basically, the app relied on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, iTunes and Last.fm data. Unfortunately for Yandex, as Wonder also lets you ask natural-language queries in a way similar to Facebook’s own Graph Search, the company instantly pulled access to its data, which was kind of a key feature, stating that the app is not, in fact, a search engine but rather a personal assistant.
The app launched last week, and according to TechCrunch, it only lasted three hours before Facebook pulled access to its data. However, from an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can ask Wonder like “What are sushi places my friends like in San Francisco?” and it will provide you with a list of restaurants approved by your buddies. The company warned that it was purely experimental and that you would only be able to ask it questions about places, music, and news at this point.
Yandex Social Search App Wonder
As a matter of fact, Yandex tried to skirt around legal trouble from Facebook by classifying Wonder more as a personal assistant, like Apple’s Siri, than as a competitor to graph search. However, that explanation was not good enough for Facebook, which blocked Wonder from accessing its data shortly after launch.
But earlier this month Facebook released it own search called Graph Search, which does exactly this, only it pulls exclusively from Facebook’s data. Hence, Wonder collects Facebook data and organizes it into a mobile app, available by voice search. Many of the same queries that can be sent through graph search were available through Wonder.
On the other hand, thinking that it could avert Facebook’s data retention, the company released a statement saying that it did not consider itself a search engine or directory, therefore it was not in violation of Facebook’s platform policy. But Facebook will not let anyone index its data for a directory or search engine without its permission first.
In fact, the social media giant has lately been putting the kibosh on a number of apps it sees as potential competitors when it comes to API access, as Josh Constine at TechCrunch reports, citing Twitter’s new Vine video app and Voxer as other casualties, as both were cut off from Facebook’s Find Friends API, which lets apps users access to their Facebook friends.
Facebook graph search (top image) and Wonder (bottom image):
Besides, Facebook’s Platform policy says, “Competing social networks: (a) You may not use Facebook Platform to export user data into a competing social network without our permission; (b) Apps on Facebook may not integrate, link to, promote, distribute, or redirect to any app on any other competing social network.” It further mentions: “You must not include data obtained from us in any search engine or directory without our written permission.”
Evidently, Yandex saw this as a potential problem, and launched anyway, but based on the nature of the app, and how it is coinciding with the roll-out of Facebook’s own Graph Search, it is no surprise that Facebook cut off access to personal data just three hours after Wonder launched Thursday morning.
The companies are reportedly deliberating to find a feasible solution about how to proceed with the app, but if Facebook does not budge, it is not going to make Wonder nearly as attractive to users as it may have been otherwise (and the jury was still out on that anyway). Apparently, Wonder can still operate with the other aforementioned networks’ data (for now), and that even includes Facebook’s Instagram. The real social data, as we all know, however, is in Facebook itself.
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