Google (News - Alert) has entered a trial period for its “Friend Connect” program in U.S. The worldwide search-engine leader has already locked horns with Facebook, the number two online community service in U.S. behind MySpace (News - Alert), in its attempt to find a space in the social-networking hierarchy.

 

Friend Connect, a recent social-networking channel launched by Google, is being blocked by Facebook (News - Alert). Facebook alleged that Google is violating the guidelines on data sharing and is risking the privacy of Facebook members.

 

Google Friend Connect lets the Web sites grow their traffic by adding social features to them. Friend Connect is made available to a limited number of Web sites to incorporate profile data from other social networks including Facebook, Google Talk, Orkut, LinkedIn, Plaxo and hi5. MySpace, however, does not participate in Friend Connect.

 

Friend Connect primarily targets Web sites of political groups and entertainment professionals and helps them amass supporters from different network communities.

 

Google Friend Connect uses some of the tools that Facebook made available to other social network developers for free. The tussle between Facebook and Friend Connect is taking a new dimension now because of the alleged violation of code of conduct by Google.

 

Facebook blocked the entry of Friend Connect completely, citing privacy concerns. Facebook says that Google redistributes user information to other developers without users’ knowledge. According to Facebook, this practice violates the privacy policy adopted by the company.

 

Google acknowledged the allegations, but said that the distribution of data was limited to links to the profile photos of the members who have consented for sharing them with the particular networking site. While sharing the information, Google replaces the profile name and ID of Facebook users with Friend Connect’s unique identifiers.

 

Google also said that it purges Facebook records from Google’s system every half an hour. As per the agreement between the two, Google has the right to retain them for a maximum 24 hours.

 

Google had launched a social consortium, OpenSocial, in November 2007, to reach out further to the social networking groups. OpenSocial lets the developers write applications that can be used in multiple social networks. Myspace is a member of OpenSocial, but Facebook is not.

 

Recently, Facebook faced another privacy challenge when it launched a marketing tool “Beacon”. The purpose of this tool was to track purchases made by Facebook members and send alerts to their friends.

 

Rachel Happe, research manager at IDC (News - Alert), feels that the dispute between the two is about control rather than privacy. According to her, Google’s Friend Connect was trying to “eat into other peoples’ value proposition, which is why Facebook objected it.”