Upset his company's Web crawlers are locked out of social networks like Facebook, Google's CEO is again pressing for social networks to open up — for the good of the consumer.
Speaking at IBM's Business Partner Leadership Conference in the US, Google CEO Eric Schmidt reiterated his position that social networks are still too closed. "If it's not searchable by Google, it's not open, and open is best for the consumer," he said.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes that people should be able to move from place to place on the Web with their data.
He added that "searchable by Google" means also searchable by other search engines, such as Yahoo. "People should be able to move from place to place, and their data is available everywhere," Schmidt said. "Social networks are a real phenomenon of people living their lives online, and it has has legs. We will have to deal with it as a society."
Google has focused efforts on creating code, such as the open source OpenSocial APIs and the Social Graph API, to make social data more portable and accessible to applications. So far, Facebook is the only major social network that has not endorsed the OpenSocial initiative, which is now managed by an independent organisation, the OpenSocial Foundation.
There are enough concerns about privacy and security with Facebook already. I certainly didn't join Facebook with the expectation that anything I contribute to my profile becomes the domain of public search engines like Google. Sounds to me like an attempt to torpedo the site. That said, I also think OpenSocial is a bad idea for similar reasons - I like the idea of a proprietary platform for social networking tools, again to give users some sort of level of security and comfort that there are controls in place to prevent malicious parties from exploiting the system. I agree with an open and free Internet, but at the same time, you need to question the motivation behind some of these statements that are being made.